By Lisa Nandy, Policy Adviser at The Children’s Society
Twenty years ago the Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted by the United Nations. It established an international benchmark for the treatment of children across the world, for the first time recognising children as individuals with their own rights, which demand universal respect from governments across the world.
The UK has never incorporated the CRC directly into law, so for twenty years those landmark rights have been beyond the grasp of children in Britain. Yet for one group: children seeking asylum, they have not even been an aspiration. Nearly 20 years ago the UK entered a reservation to the CRC, placing immigration considerations above children’s rights, sending a strong signal that these children do not deserve equal treatment and setting in train decades of discrimination.
Last year when the UK finally removed this reservation it marked a new approach, recognising refugee children as children first and foremost. It was welcome and long overdue, but will it make a difference?
The UK’s treatment of refugee children has persistently fallen far short of the global standards set out in the CRC. Children are subjected to an adversarial asylum process, often without adequate emotional and legal support, a process that would be unthinkable for a British child alleging abuse. We lock up 1000 children a year, without time limit or judicial oversight, simply because their parents sought asylum in the UK. Refugee children are growing up in destitution across the country as a direct result of Government policy and practice, and yet still it refuses to count them in its measure of child poverty. Half of all young people who are seeking asylum are age disputed every year and at least half of those turn out to be children. Many are detained or housed with adults while they plead their case. And refugee children are still the only children who do not have any formal link with the Department for Children, Schools and Families.
Yet the Government has continued to claim it is meeting the high standards set out in the CRC. It has been hard to find a way out of this impasse, until recently when the Courts have shown an increasing willingness to use the CRC to interpret other rights children have. This has produced good results elsewhere; the European Court of Human Rights has for some time probed the child specific nature of the standards set out in EU Conventions, the Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights, using the CRC as a benchmark. Last year the Court decided the deportation of a child was a breach of his Article 8 rights, in the context of the CRC obligation to have regard to a child’s best interests.
The willingness of the Courts to consider the CRC may succeed where the Government has so far failed to act. There is significant potential for the rights set out in the Convention to become a reality for children seeking asylum in the UK, but change cannot be far-reaching or fast enough. For too many children it has already been too long.
Posted by Lisa Nandy