Abstract
There is no doubt that children represent a vulnerable group in many contexts. That also applies to medical research since minor participants are generally not capable of granting a fully informed and truly autonomous consent.
Nevertheless, research on children is hardly replaceable for advancing paediatric medicine and minimising its risks. In this paper, we analyse how the best interests of the child in the context of medical research are protected by international law in Europe as well as Czech legal regulation.
We also use Kantianism as a strictly deontological normative theory to test whether the rules aiming at the protection of the best interests of the child can be considered sufficient from the ethical perspective.