The UN Human Rights Council held its annual day on children’s rights on 13 March 2014. The Children’s Rights International Network (CRIN) reported live from the event. The theme for this year’s event was access to justice as this area of law is largely neglected for children.
Click here to read the full report of the event by CRIN.
In her opening address, Ms Flavia Pansieri noted that access to justice for children is “not just a fundamental right by itself but also a prerequisite for the protection and promotion of all the other human rights”.
The Council first addressed the barriers that face children in accessing justice. As Ms. Pansieri noted in her opening statement, justice systems are complex and difficult to understand and are daunting for an adult, let alone a child. Mariangela Zappia, Head of the Permanent Delegation of the EU to the UN, picked up on the theme of barriers children face, noting the perceived low status of children exacerbates the problems they face. “Children don’t know how to access justice”, she said, and “[they] feel that they are not heard or taken seriously.” As Ms. Pansieri noted, in practice this low status takes the form of a lack of legal capacity to act without parents or representatives, a particularly problematic situation where there is a conflict of interests between a child and parent or where the perpetrator of a violation is within the child’s family environment.
The Council then turned to various different ways and measures of how to overcome the barriers that children face in accessing justice. One of these was to improve children’s access to information about their rights and to “free, consistent, enforceable and accountable legal representation”.
The Council stressed the importance for children of “non-judicial means of challenging violations which may be less intimidating” and suggested the introduction of ombudspeople that would defend and promote children’s rights. The Council also stressed the importance that children should have access to the same legal remedies that are available to adults.