Exploring practice at home and in other jurisdictions to draw learning for Scotland as it moves to incorporate the UNCRC.

In summer 2023, Together was joined by Isobel Mintz, a candidate on the LLM Human Rights programme at Edinburgh University. Isobel completed a work-based placement researching the extent to which children have been involved in processes that the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child uses to check up on how well children’s rights are being upheld in a particular country. In this blog on #WorldChildrensDay, Isobel shares some of her key findings and reflections from the project as Scotland moves to incorporate the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) into law.

The purpose of the research

At a juncture where increasing attention is being paid to children’s rights in Scotland, it is crucial that there is an embedded practice of consulting with children and young people on the implementation of their rights across law, policy and practice. As such, this project collects fifteen Scottish and global mechanisms which demonstrate emerging promising practice of involving children and young people in the UNCRC reporting and monitoring process. These include an international consultation mechanism run by a Canadian organisation, creative workshops in Samoa and children’s parliaments in countries such as Bolivia. These mechanisms are compared with Scottish examples such as the recent work of #TeamScotlandUN, Together’s Rights Detectives and visits to Scotland by UN Committee members.

Through researching for this piece, I discovered that children’s rights practitioners were passionate about improving the scope of their participation work to include children and young people with a wider range of backgrounds, abilities, ages, geographical location and more. Further, when evaluating Scottish mechanisms against the legal framework of this dissertation it became apparent that it would be useful to conceptualise this work as a guide towards more inclusive practices of children’s participation in Scotland. Overall, this work is structured in accordance with the chronological stages of the UNCRC reporting cycle, which is an ongoing, cyclical process. This structure was chosen to ensure that children’s participation in monitoring the implementation of the UNCRC is understood as ‘an on-going process at the national level’ which the Scottish Government should consistently be planning for, working on and responding to.

The legal framework around children’s participation

Primarily, this research utilises Article 12 of the UNCRC and General Comment 12 from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child as its legal foundation to compare Scottish mechanisms for children’s participation with global examples. Article 12 of the UNCRC states that:

‘state Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child’.

Therefore, this report is centred around ensuring that the Scottish Government meets the obligations of Article 12 at every stage of the UNCRC reporting process for every child regardless of their background, age, geographical location, other characteristics or experience. Moreover, General Comment 12 provides nine basic requirements that participation mechanisms must meet in order to implement Article 12. I used these as the basis of my analysis for each example. This criteria included ensuring children and young people are able to initiate ideas and activities, being transparent and informative and inclusive amongst others. 

Empowering children and young people

Critically, children’s participation mechanisms should not solely be a means to an end for government bodies in producing policies which are representative of the demands of children across a jurisdiction. The concept of empowerment transforms the referent subject of children’s participation from policy development to the child or young person themselves. Here, the focus is on the development of confidence, skills and a network for the children and young people engaging in participation programmes. Whilst this is not an aspect which is mentioned in the UNCRC legal framework for children’s participation, there is a wealth of academic literature on the topic such as Laura Lundy’s ‘Lundy Model’ which underpins this work. At its core, my report calls for the Scottish Government to ensure that children’s best interests and their personal growth is the focus of any participation mechanism.

Recommendations to improve children’s participation in Scotland

Despite Scottish Government’s aspiration of becoming a global leader for children’s rights, this analysis identifies seventeen areas for improvement in current practices of children’s participation in the reporting and monitoring of the UNCRC. These range from investing in under-researched topics such as how to include babies and younger children in participation mechanisms, to supporting former participants to harness their institutional knowledge of the UNCRC reporting process to inform new rights advocates in a sustainable and empowering cycle of mentoring and passing down knowledge.

Going forward, this project highlights the model used by Together’s Rights Detectives programme as a format which holds great potential for this end. On the one hand, to capture the needs and desires of children outside of the central belt in Scotland in an accessible manner. Mainly though the way it allows for children and young people to direct the project’s approach and to advocate for their rights in a creative way, rather than solely through the traditional, more ‘adult’-oriented channels of high-level speech writing and public speaking. Alternative modes of advocacy was an important topic which was explored throughout this work.

On the other hand, the expansion of this model would strengthen children and young people’s ability to hold local and national government bodies to account and ensure a wider group of children’s voices are heard.

Altogether, the recommendations in the concluding section of this report capture all of the learning from global and domestic examples which is drawn from the comparative analysis of the main body of this work. They are aimed at both the Scottish Government and civil society organisations to highlight the necessity for these groups to work together to ensure that Scotland adheres to its legal obligation to install children’s participation into the UNCRC reporting cycle and to empower children and young people in the process.

Click here to read full research paper

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