Rights protect
The human rights frameworks provide us with some of the most powerful tools we have to protect children, families and communities. Yet children’s rights are often talked about in a narrow way, rather than recognising that children – as members of their families and of their communities – need all rights recognised.
Reclaim Rights for Children brings together action to demand that all state interaction with children and their families must fully comply with human rights as detailed in frameworks signed up to by the UK government.
“Practically every area of government policy – from education to public health – affects children to some degree. Short-sighted policymaking that fails to take children into account has a negative impact on the future of all members of society.”
Protection of children
Strengthening the respect for human rights and access to them strengthens children’s rights and make their lives better, happier and healthier. Yet even the Human Rights Act is under attack.
Shockingly there are those who actively want to remove children’s rights. The Conservative Party have long been openly against the Human Rights Act choosing to frame the protections it gives as being ‘only’ about refugees and “criminals”, ignoring that it is children who most rely on the protection provided. They also quietly removed all reference to human rights from government safeguarding and child protection policy and practice which is harming children and their families.
The current Labour Government gave a commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights.
Rights report on UK
“…between 2018 and 2021, about 45% of claimants in HRA cases were children, attesting to the fact that restrictions on bringing human rights cases to domestic courts would disproportionately affect children.”
Dunja Mijatović,
Commissioner for Human Rights,
Council of Europe
Report on UK (2022)
“The Human Rights Act underpins families’ dogged battles to make the system for supporting their child work as it should.”
Family matters
The fate and wellbeing of children and of their families are intertwined. Measures which hurt parents or legal caregivers will of course hurt the children who rely on their adults for support. Human rights protects the family because this protects children.
This should be obvious yet repeatedly UK governments repeatedly enact measures which harm families by making them poorer, or removing support and then – in the name of children’s rights – ‘rescue’ the individual child by removing them from their family. Separation of a child from their family is in itself harmful and should be a last resort.
Punitive measures such as fines or custodial sentences for parents will hurt the child.
“…the family, as the fundamental group of society and the natural environment for the growth and well-being of all its members and particularly children, should be afforded the necessary protection and assistance so that it can fully assume its responsibilities within the community”
What the UK govt agreed to
Human rights treaties agreed to by the UK Government include civil, political, social, economic and cultural rights. Yet year after year after year the UK fails to provide the social and economic rights they agreed to, evidenced in reports from UK based organisations, from the human rights committees and by the unbearable hardship of many children’s lives.
Human rights treaties: the UK Govt agreed to ALL of these!
“If every guarantee that they had signed up to were to be met, our lives would be peaceful, secure, healthy and comfortable…”
Council of Europe
Compass: Manual to Human Rights Education with Young People
All rights are needed
Rights are sometimes described as ‘indivisible’, that no one right is more important than another because they are all needed for a life of human dignity. In practice is mostly accepted that some rights are overarching rights without which other rights cannot function. General principles include children’s right to life, right to be heard, right to non-discrimination and the right for their best interests to be considered. This doesn’t mean that the other rights do not matter, more that these rights are foundational rights for the others and are important for understanding how they are to be applied.
Privacy is also a foundational right, other rights depending on it. Children’s right to privacy is under serious threat, including from legislation going through parliament right now.
Rights protect children. Full stop. All rights must all be respected.
Rights trackers
Kids’ Rights Index
Equality and Human Rights Commission Human Rights Tracker