On the 20th of November 1989 The UN General Assembly approved the Convention on the Rights of the Child and Adolescents (CRC), thereby initiating, in the following years, through the progressive interpretation of the text and its operative and regulatory instruments, an effective pathway on the protection of minors. This has often been conditioned by geographic and cultural contexts in which religion has increasingly acquired a socio-identity relevance.

The article follows through evolutionary stages in international law into the seldom- explored recognition of minor’s religious freedom. The aim is to outline the progressive shift of focus, within the international regulatory framework, on the best interests of the minor as the limit and purpose of the synergy between parents and public authorities in the educational process, in fact inclusive of religious sentiment. The significant presence of foreign minors in our territorial context requires an in-depth understanding of the Islamic religion and of its influence on the educational , normative and identity sphere of Muslim minor. A specific analysis is therefore dedicated to the education of Islamic minor through the examination of both the rules of norms of classical Islamic law as well as of those emanating from international intra Islamic conventions.

A multi-level protection of the best interest of the child is confirmed in the light of jurisprudence which has evolved in the Strasbourg Court and through other recent pronouncements of the Constitutional Court converging with supranational sources. To conclude, in the thirtieth anniversary celebrations of the CRC, it should be noted that notwithstanding that it is considered, among the foremost agreements in Human Rights adopted by the United Nations, the one with the greatest number of signatories, much more needs to be done for it to be effectively fulfilled, when considering the low efficiency of its operational instruments. In any case, the protection of minor’s religious freedom remains relegated to a secondary role, ancillary to other rights.