 Article 12.1 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child not only accords the child the right freely to express its views on matters affecting the child. It also, and crucially, gives the child an assurance that these views will be given ‘due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child’. Great emphasis is now placed on what are termed a child’s ‘participation rights’ as opposed to his or her ‘protection rights’. The latter, as the name suggests, protect the child from violent, abusive, cruel or exploitative treatment. ‘Participation rights’ by contrast, give the child some entitlement to be the agents of their own lives. Article 12.1 provides a crucial underpinning justification for such rights. There are problems in understanding how practically to implement such rights (Ang et al, 2006). There are also theoretical issues in making precise sense of what a right such as that enshrined in Article 12.1 might mean. The celebrated British legal judgement in the Gillick case (Gillick [1986]) provides a useful guide. This judgement has been extensively discussed, and it has also been highly influential in matters relating to the consent of children to medical treatment.