Access to justice for children and young people is essential for the protection and promotion of children’s rights.
Children have many rights and protections under Irish law. Despite this, children and young people continue to experience discrimination or find their rights are not being respected. This is because they and their families are simply unaware that there are special legal remedies that could help them. Access to specialised legal advice on children’s rights and entitlements is next to impossible for most families. Children and young people can only access civil legal aid through a parent or guardian. Strict financial eligibility criteria apply with the result that many families on low or modest incomes are excluded. The system is over stretched and under resourced meaning that legal aid is refused in many areas of law not specifically excluded under the Legal Aid Act. With the consequence result that children and young people cannot access the legal supports necessary to realize their rights through legal action.
The Children’s Rights Alliance has established a new Access to Justice Initiative for children and their families to make them aware of the legal remedies available to them when their rights are breached and crucially, to ensure that they can access legal advice on what is the best remedy to use in a way that they can understand. The new Initiative will implement a legal information strategy on children and young people’s legal rights and entitlements and promote access to child-friendly justice in civil, criminal and administrative proceedings.
As part of the first phase of the Initiative, we have as established an information line for children, young people and their families or for people who are working with them to access basic legal information. The phone line will be open twice a week -Tuesdays 10am -2pm and Wednesdays 3pm -7pm. To contact the information line people can call 01 9020494 or email query@childrensrights.ie.
A central part of the Initiative will be the establishment of specialist legal advice outreach clinics for children and young people which will commence in the coming months. The legal clinics will take place throughout the country and will encompass both general clinics and specialist clinics focusing on the areas of disability and children in care.
We will also be reviewing our Know Your Rights information resource which covers children’s rights and entitlements and addresses the basic information gaps that young people have in education, health, child protection, family law, migration/refugee law, equality law, criminal law and their interactions with the Gardaí. We will also be working with legal professionals who have direct contact with children to ensure they are trained in communicating with them at all ages and stages of development.
We will be documenting the issues arising from individual cases to identify trends, patterns and problems facing children. We will launch these important statistics annually to educate government, decision-makers, policy makers, the community and voluntary sector and the media on what the key issues are for children.
For more information on the Initiative and to keep up to date with the roll out of the clinics see our website here or email julie@childrensrights.ie.