What is the Refugee Children's Rights Project?
The project is a new way of looking at children's refugee protection and welfare, taking the rights contained in the Convention on the Rights of the Child and applying them to refugee law. This way, we hope to bring a much better understanding of the needs and best interests of the child into focus in the way that legal representatives, decision-makers, policy-makers and the courts consider refugee children's rights. The project is a partnership between the Children's Legal Centre and Islington Law Centre. It combines policy advocacy, test cases, advice, training and strategic thinking with other lawyers and non-governmental organisations about how to consider children's rights in their own work.
What kind of cases does the project take on?
The RCRP is developing a litigation strategy to make sure that it can make the maximum impact for all refugee children, not just for individual clients. Together with Baljeet Sandhu, Islington Law Centre's RCRP co-director, we are taking test cases, either directly for individual clients, or intervening in others' cases where we can bring a child rights perspective to assist the courts. We will not be taking a high volume of cases, but will choose cases we consider raise significant issues, will affect large numbers of refugee children and where successful litigation will have the biggest impact. We are interested in cases where we can develop the content of best interests, the voice of the child, family, health, education and development rights and a child-appropriate understanding of persecution and harm.
Why is it important that this project exists?
In the light of tighter legal aid rules and contracting regulations, we are working with very limited resources and against a backdrop of severe public spending cuts. All of these factors have an effect on the way children access legal representation and other vital services that they need. With fewer and fewer lawyers taking children's cases, it is essential that we make the most difference we can with each case we take, and on each issue of concern. To do this, we need to build capacity within the legal community to better understand and deliver child-appropriate procedures and legal arguments and to share our expert policy knowledge with others in the refugee sector to give them the tools to promote children's rights more effectively. The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund has funded the project, and we also have the benefit of the generosity of pro bono lawyers and volunteers working on legal interventions. Without their support we could not do this work.
