Explore the Issue of Children's Rights Commissioners.

Explore the Issue of Children’s Rights Commissioners.

In what ways can adults best promote the welfare of children and young people? How can their rights be most effectively promoted and their best interests protected, and who is best able to decide about children's welfare, rights, and best interests? These are age-old questions, but some of the answers are new. The traditional assumption that adults -- parents, professionals and politicians -- always know best is increasingly being challenged, in two respects.

The first is about knowledge, recognizing the many ways children and young people can seem invisible within research and policy making, and ensuring their voice is heard. The second is about action, ensuring that adults really do act in children's best interests. Traditional assumptions have been most powerfully challenged by cases where adults responsible for protecting children instead abuse them, within families, residential children's homes, schools, and even churches. In this essay I will be considering these issues, with particular reference to children's rights commissioners.

Norway was one of first countries to recognize the need for a radical shift in the way adult society relates to its young people, at every level. In 1981 the Norwegian government established the first children's rights commissioner, more often called a children's ombudsman in Norway.

Tronde Waage is Norway's current ombudsman for children.

The idea for setting up an independent commissioner's office for children started in the seventies because of the need to revise the Children's Act in Norway. Based on that society's changing, they wanted to have one independent office who could speak children's interest towards public administration regional and local governments, and the private sector. But it should be based on an act from parliament and have statutory power.

One thing which is important to them is that every child in Norway should know about the ombudsman's work and what they can use the ombudsman for, that they are their spokesperson. So in every school, in the curriculum, it stated they learn about the ombudsman's work and what they can use them for.

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This commitment to address a wide range of children's issues and to establish close links with children and young people themselves, are features of the work of a children's rights commissioner. Twenty years after Norway set up the first office, children's rights commissioners have been established in nearly thirty countries. It's a multi-faceted role. In the course of one week the staff in a commissioner's office might be lobbying government ministers about the impact of a new law on children, challenging a private company about the way they target advertising towards children, consulting with young people about the adequacy of school, social welfare, or leisure services, as well as responding to particular cases of individual young people who approach the commissioner for help and advice.

It's very important that we establish children's rights commissioners. Children as a constituency have no vote. They have very limited access to the courts, very limited access to the media, and therefore they're not able to exercise the kind of democratic rights that adults are able to exercise, and, at the same time, they are disproportionately affected by the impact of public policy, they're disproportionately vulnerable to its impact and they are very heavy users of public services. So as a group of people, what governments do, what policy makers do, has a lot of influence on them, a lot of impact on them, but they're powerless to respond to those measures and therefore they need advocates who can support and represent their interests, their rights and their needs.

There are lots of agencies, institutions and government departments which can be said to represent children's interests, including in some countries, Ministries for Children. But the Office of Children's Rights Commissioner has a very different role to play.

A number of governments are setting up ministries for children. Those are very, very different from children's rights commissioners. The role of a children's rights commissioner is to hold the government to account. It's a body which is independent of government, outside government completely, and is empowered to act on behalf of children and to hold the government to account in respect of the rights that those governments have committed to under international law.

Children's rights commissioners are very different from children's movements. They are characterized by an institution which has legal powers to act on behalf of children, to represent children's interests and to advocate for them, to investigate, and, as far as possible, it is imperative that those bodies are informed by, and influenced by, and fully conversant with the views and concerns and priorities of children. But ultimately it's an adult-led body in which the adults have the power to speak to government and to undertake investigations. That's quite different from an organization, for example like Article 12 in the UK, which is a children's organization, made up of children under eighteen, which is adult facilitated, but the children themselves direct the policy, initiate activities, initiate campaigns, and have a dialogue directly with politicians and policy makers.

Within the UK, Wales has taken a significant step in relation to children's rights by the appointment of a children's commissioner. The young people of Wales regarded such an appointment as addressing important issues.

There are a lot of bodies who are deciding on behalf of children what's best for them. It's important that children's rights commissioners break a new mould, and that they are established with an absolute clear explicit commitment, detailed in legislation, wherever possible, that their obligation is to work with children, that they take their cue, if you like, in terms of the issues that they raise, in terms of the way that they raise and where they raise them, from children themselves. And there are a wide range of strategies for achieving that which the different commissioners around the world are beginning to explore, through advisory groups, through the Internet, through surveys and communications, a whole range of different ways in which they have to listen to children, listen to what preoccupies and concerns children, and take their lead from children themselves, rather than assuming, in the absence of that voice, that they know best and they know what is in children's interests.

It's too early to evaluate the impact of a commissioner for children in Wales, but in other countries there is evidence of the benefits of such an office. For example, in Hungary a highly critical investigation into the poor quality of state-run children's homes led to major reforms.

In Iceland the ombudsman successfully challenged the practice of sending young offenders to prison, rather than to rehabilitation centres.

The appointment of a children's commission is often the first step towards a cultural change in the ways children and young people are perceived.

Although it's difficult to differentiate how individual bodies impact on children's lives I think it's fair to say that a country which has a human rights commission or a children's rights commissioner which has a high profile, is properly resourced and properly empowered, is able to begin to contribute towards cultural change in which societies begin to take children more seriously and recognize the importance of giving them a higher political priority.

It's very important that in establishing children's rights commissioners that we don't replicate patterns of adults assuming they know best for children, and they know which issues they ought to be taking up on children's behalf. One concrete example of where that's been attempted is in South Africa, where the Human Rights Commission which has a dedicated children's rights commissioner post within it, when that post was first set up, the task that they set for themselves was to consult with children in all nine provinces of South Africa. And they went out and spent considerable time with groups of children to talk with them about how far they felt their rights were being respected, what they understood about their rights, which were the issues which were most important to them, which violations that were happening did they feel were most important. How did they feel that the Human Rights Commission could communicate with them most effectively and what did they want from the Human Rights Commission? How could it help them in terms of improving their situation and achieving better respect for their rights? So it was a very concrete attempt to actually go out to find children, work with children and really get a sense so that the work that they then took on was rooted in a real understanding of what children out there were saying.

While there's good evidence that children's rights commissioners can make a positive impact, the role is far from easy. It can also lead to tensions, on the one hand, needing to protect children's best interests, while on the other hand respecting their participatory rights, their views, and their competence.