Children’s Right to Access Justice and Effective Remedies: Plus Ça Change?

A blog by Helen Stalford, from Eurochild member the University of Liverpool, exploring why the “Child Friendly Justice” agenda falls short of delivering true justice for children.

As we anticipate the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s new General Comment (No.27) on Children’s Right to Access Justice and Effective Remedies, it is timely to reflect on what justice means for children and whether current, dominant articulations of children’s justice are really fit for purpose.

The draft General Comment reflects and builds upon nearly two decades of initiatives aimed at adapting the justice process for children. Most prominent of these has been the Council of Europe’s Guidelines on Child-Friendly Justice, published in 2010.^[1] They define child-friendly justice as “justice systems which guarantee the respect and the effective implementation of all children’s rights at the highest attainable level…” and establish a framework for enabling justice professionals to audit and adapt each stage of the legal process to accommodate children. These, in turn, have inspired further guidance at international^[2] and regional level, including Guidelines on Action for Children in the Justice System in Africa.^[3] The European Commission has adopted child-friendly justice as Thematic area 4 of its most recent EU strategy on the Rights of the Child^[4] and has incorporated the principles associated with child-friendly justice into a range of EU legislative and policy instruments.

Perhaps more significantly, child friendly justice has provided the backdrop for extensive investment - amounting to tens of millions of euros - in a far-reaching programme of research, training and capacity-building. Notably, the European Commission and the Council of Europe joined forces in a new initiative aimed at “developing child-friendly frameworks, strengthening capacities of specialised staff so that they are able to use child-friendly procedures, and raising awareness of children in contact with the law and their parents on children’s rights before, during and after judicial proceedings.”

The intentions driving Child Friendly Justice are no doubt noble and the efforts to achieve them have been extensive. However, there are serious questions as to what child-friendly justice can achieve for children and whether it has succeeded at all in reflecting and responding to what justice means, conceptually, practically and ethically. The arguments can be summarised as follows. First, the terminology of ‘child-friendly justice’ represents a shallow representation of children’s engagement with justice in a way that reinforces their passive and impoverished status in law. It does little to promote robust, critical reflection as to what justice means to and for children and how children can actively promote and achieve justice on their own terms. 

Second, ‘child-friendly justice’ represents a deeply problematic conflation of ‘justice’ with formal processes. It is overwhelmingly focused on children who are engaged in court-based or administrative systems and does little to acknowledge or address the root causes of injustice that place children in those systems and processes in the first place. Third, child-friendly justice is grounded in systems and structures that ultimately serve adult agendas rather than those of children. Courts and legal processes are adult-driven: they are designed and run by adults; decisions are made by adults, implementing laws created by adults. Even seemingly empowering procedural adaptations associated with child-friendly Justice do little more than tinker around the edges and masque existing structural flaws, rarely translating into better outcomes for children.  

Of course, there is no doubt that a framework is needed to enable children to better navigate and be protected in the course of legal proceedings. Global data provides a sobering reminder of the scope and severity of the crisis contexts in which children become embroiled in judicial or administrative processes. For example, the total number of children displaced by conflict and violence across the world rose to 48.8 million by the end of 2024, including approximately 19.1 million refugee children and asylum-seekers.^[5] An estimated 240 million children have disabilities – 1 in 10 of all children worldwide.^[6] Almost 260,000 children worldwide who are in conflict with the law are held in detention.^[7] Annually, 330,000 children are held in migration detention, 19,000 children are living with their primary carers in prisons, and over 5.4 million children are separated from their parents and living in residential care, education, health and welfare institutions.^[8]

This data provides only a cursory snapshot of the diverse contexts within which children are navigating formal justice proceedings, many of which are complex and adversarial. Those encountering intersecting forms of discrimination or exclusion are likely to be embroiled in different justice systems simultaneously, navigating equally complex administrative and welfare systems to access health, housing, education and social care. While these statistics highlight the importance of promoting children’s access to justice, they also prompt serious questions as to whether the child-friendly justice agenda represents a serious case of closing the stable door once the horse has bolted; they appear to have achieved little in diverting children away from the crises that force them into such processes.

General Comment 27 provides a fresh opportunity to appraise what more effective, preventative and protective justice for children and yet the draft seems unlikely to address the fundamental limitations underpinning the existing Child Friendly Justice agenda. While the UN Committee’s omission of the term ‘child-friendly justice’ hints at a potentially more effective blueprint for children’s justice, the General Comments risk perpetuating the flawed presumption endorsed by the Child Friendly Justice agenda: that children’s rights can be effectively enforced through facilitated access to formal judicial and administrative systems and processes. In reality, the courts and legal processes that we associate with child-friendly justice are not so much arenas of justice for children but, rather, disturbingly compelling evidence that children are still being fundamentally failed by society and by the state.

This blog is based on a more detailed forthcoming article by Helen Stalford and Barry Goldson entitled ‘With Friends Like You….?: Why the “Child Friendly Justice” agenda cannot achieve justice for children’

For further details, please contact:

Helen Stalford, European Children’s Rights Unit, School of Law and Social Justice, University of Liverpool.

Notes

1. Guidelines of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe on child-friendly justice adopted by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe on 17 November 2010 and explanatory memorandum, published CoE, 2011.
2. Eg, UN Committee on the Rights of the Child General comment No 24 (2019) on children’s rights in the child justice system CRC/C/GC/24 (18 September 2019), paras 5, 11, 46.
3. African Child Policy Forum, 2011, available at https://app.box.com/s/9zcgxr0kvdck9wf1933toagcignpr5g5. Last accessed 30 July 2025
4. https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/justice-and-fundamental-rights/rights-child/child-friendly-justice_en
5. UNICEF, Displacement update, June 2025, https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-migration-and-displacement/displacement/
6. UNICEF, ‘Seen, Counted, Included: Using Data to shed light on the well-being of children with disabilities’, November 2021, notably Chapter 4. 
7. UNICEF, Justice for Children update, June 2025. See also UNICEF, ‘Estimating the number of children deprived of liberty in the administration of justice’, November 2021
8. Committee on the Rights of the Child, United Nations Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty, UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 11 July 2019.