The UK has taken some "important and progressive" steps towards protecting children's rights in the UK, but not all of Britain's children have benefited. This was the conclusion drawn by Parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) in its report, following an inquiry into the UK's compliance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).
The Committee commended the Government's 2010 commitment "to give due regard" to the CRC when developing policy and legislation, but observed that momentum for developing good practice across departments "seems to have lessened over the course of this Parliament."
The report went on to note a lack of consistency across Government departments on assessing the extent to which policies are compatible with the CRC. This means that the damaging effects of certain policies have been overlooked in some cases, resulting in "pockets of children left behind", as stated by the Director of Children’s Rights Alliance for England, Paola Uccellari, during her witness statement.
Some departments, according to the report, consider that children's rights are only relevant to the Department for Education. In order to protect the rights of migrant children, who fall primarily under the authority of the Home Office, "[m]ore needs to be done across Government to spread knowledge and expertise" about the CRC.
While the Committee stated that ideally the CRC would be incoporated into domestic law, it recognised the need for a more "practical" solution that would be accepted across party lines:
If such a dedicated focus on children’s rights were manifest in legislation and policy across the board, much of the debate about incorporation versus non-incorporation would become an irrelevance.
The report was also insistent on the need for the UK to ratify the CRC optional protocol – an individual complaints mechanism that enables children to seek redress for alleged rights violations at the UN's Committee on the Rights of the Child. As the Children's Commissioner for England has no power to investigate individual complaints, the Committee noted that the protocol is especially vital for children in this country, who will otherwise struggle to access justice.
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Click here to find out what else the UK can do to safeguard human rights at home
