Co-ordinated by the AIRE Centre in London, this award-winning Project’s aim is to promote a joined up child-centred approach by legal professionals who work with children separated (or being separated) from their families. It will enable legal practitioners to:

• Share their experiences of the situation of separated children in all the different kinds of legal proceedings which affect them, e.g. taking children into care, contact and residence issues in private law disputes, relocation or abduction, the child victims of trafficking or whose parents are such victims, the effects on children of prisoners of sentencing and sentence management decisions, the situation of minor asylum seekers, including both accompanied and unaccompanied minors, the impact of immigration measures on children. This will enable them to identify the best practices in one field with a view to applying then in another.

• Learn or expand knowledge of how to use, for the benefit of separated children, the available European and international remedies, such as the European Court of Human Rights, the European Committee on Social Rights and the third Optional Protocol of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on a Communications Procedure (OP3). Two of the project partner countries – Ireland and Belgium – have accepted the right of individual petition to the Committee on the Rights of the Child under OP3 to that Convention.

• Expand their familiarity with the relevant legislation and case law e.g. EU acquis (legislative and jurisprudential), the ECHR jurisprudence and the case law of the ESC relevant to developing child-centred justice for children in situations where they and their parents or siblings are separated or being separated – for example in situations arising from children seeking international protection as asylum seekers or who are victims of trafficking,  who have been abducted or whose parents are imprisoned in another jurisdiction.

Children’s competence is the fundamental axis around which their legal rights revolve. It is crucial in areas such as medical consent, sexual exploitation and criminal culpability to understand whether children’s views and choices are ‘their own’. Yet there is little agreement on how (or even whether) to measure or understand competence, though it is often cited in various areas of law and practice. Children’s rights are therefore in danger of losing meaning as competence is not understood; and adult/child power dynamics insufficiently recognised. Children’s lawyers, judges, doctors and other practitioners make decisions as to children’s ‘competence’ seemingly in a knowledge vacuum, as theory and evidence appear only to exist in developmental psychology; a discipline which is contested, overly-clinical, and largely impenetrable to outsiders. This Independent Social Research Foundation-funded study critiques developmental psychology approaches to children’s competence in light of scholarship from childhood, disability and feminist theory; in order to enhance understanding of how children’s competence should be approached in a way which gives full acknowledgement to the importance of context (information, power etc.).

https://www.isrf.org/fellows-projects/aoife-daly/

Outputs

Assessing Children’s Capacity through the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child by Dr Aoife Daly, UCC School of Law

Read here: Assessing Children's Capacity through the UNCRC [pdf]

This article seeks to reconceptualise approaches to assessing children’s capacity, and it is argued that efforts by professionals, theorists and others to understand capacity should be done via a process which is explicitly rights-based. An approach to children’s capacity is proposed through four concepts based on the CRC: Autonomy, Evidence, Support and Protection.