Report: Children’s Access to Justice Shouldn’t Have a Price Tag

📆 Join us as we officially launch our AccessToJustice Report for Challenge Poverty Week, following our Access to Justice Round Table event on 25th June 2024.

This year the Scottish Child Law Centre has received more requests than ever from children, young people and families needing legal help in crisis situations. Poverty is the biggest barrier to realising children’s rights and significantly affects access to justice when children’s rights have been breached.

It is more difficult than ever for children and families to access legal advice and representation. Many children and families do not qualify for Legal Aid or cannot find a Legal Aid solicitor in their local area and cannot afford the fees of private solicitors. This means that children’s rights are being breached and they have no way to seek legal redress to remedy this and no mechanism to hold decision makers accountable.

In this webinar, we will present our findings from the Round Table and discuss how access to justice can be made a reality for all children and young people, particularly those affected by poverty.

Our report was born from a Round Table we held with organisations that work with children and young people, and those that specialise in children’s and human rights. We asked our delegates what are the biggest issues that they see surrounding access to justice for children, and what the short-term and long-term solutions could be.

We found that the biggest issues that children face in accessing justice are a lack of Legal Aid solicitors, a lack of awareness of what their rights are and limited access to free legal advice, representation and advocacy when they need it.

Like many organisations, we are proud that Scotland incorporated the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) into law this year. This was an important step in enshrining the gold standard for children’s rights in Scots law. As poverty and lack of access to justice are breaches of children’s rights, we hoped to see work begin right away on remedying these breaches.

Yet, urgent action is needed and we call upon the Scottish Government to act to address the significant children’s rights breaches and ensure that all children and families have access to justice.

Join us to discuss how together we can use rights-based approaches to hold authorities accountable on poverty issues and cut the price tag on children’s rights.

This FREE event will be held on Friday 11th October from 11.00 am-12.00 pm. Register to attend this event here: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/86611d58-507d-42b1-9bf3-d16ad216e103@7b17d6dd-4e00-4d34-bf04-81d6c2577be9