How Incorporation of the UNCRC can improve Public Authorities’ Children’s Rights Reporting
Author: Andrea Gantous
Social Researcher and recent LLM in Human Rights Graduate from the University of Edinburgh
Children are undoubtedly one of the most vulnerable groups in society, often highly reliant on public services and the most likely to suffer from reductions in public spending. It is therefore particularly important to monitor the realisation of children’s human rights through public authorities reporting and carry out impact assessments of the decisions they make. Meaningful and effective children’s rights reporting is essential for monitoring duty bearers’ accountability and compliance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in Scotland.
Before the UNCRC (Incorporation) (Scotland) Act 2024, the major legislation concerning rights was the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 (CYP Act). Part 1 of the CYP Act required Scotland’s public authorities, including local authorities, health boards, integration joint boards, and others, to produce and publish 3 yearly reports on children’s rights, while the Scottish Government provided a non-statutory guidance on public authorities’ Part 1, Section 2 reporting duty.
In January 2023, the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland, issued requests under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 to the 101 public authorities listed in the CYP Act for their children’s rights reports from the 2017-2020 and 2020-2023 periods.
As of June 2023, the Commissioner received responses from 78 public authorities, 11 of which explained that they did not hold information that fell within the scope of the request. Fifty-one of the authorities indicated they had produced a children’s rights report for the 2017-2020 period, and forty-seven had started work on their children’s rights report for the 2020-2023 period. Noting that there had been minimal scrutiny of the children’s rights reports produced under the 2014 Act, I sought to address this gap with my dissertation for my LLM in Human Rights.
My analysis of the public authorities’ children’s rights reports found a range of reports that did not always report effectively on children’s rights. I identified several key inconsistencies across the reports. I found a preference for children’s wellbeing and the related children’s services planning duty in Part 3 of the CYP Act that meant several authorities prioritised these Part 3 duties and did not produce children’s rights reports at all. The relationship between the authorities’ service planning and reporting duties as it pertains to children’s wellbeing and children’s rights had not been clearly delineated in the 2014 Act. As such, several public authorities provided a single document to fulfil their Part 1 and 2 duties, including both children’s rights reports and children’s services plans, which did not give equal weight to both.
The incorporation of UNCRC articles and clusters, proper use of evidence, and children’s participation varied widely and tended not to be integrated into public authorities reports. While these three elements are all necessary for effective reporting, they were not legally required of the authorities. Without requiring the same level of reporting from the public authorities as the Committee on the Rights of the Child requires of State parties, the reports risk not being as effective at monitoring progress on rights realisation. Finally, the reports were often not accessible, creating barrier to accountability, monitoring the implementation of the UNCRC, and fulfilling children’s participation rights.
The UNCRC (Incorporation) (Scotland) Act 2024, which came into force in July 2024, expands upon the reporting duty of authorities as listed in Section 19. It legally requires authorities to report on actions taken in each reporting period to further the rights of children, the actions it intends to take during the next period (see Section 18(1)) and publish a child-friendly version of the report (see Section 18(4)). These requirements should help mitigate the previous reports’ inaccessibility. However, whether the statutory guidance (Section 20) on the Scottish Ministers’ Section 18 reporting duty will be sufficient to address the other issues raised in my report remains unclear.
Author Bio
Andrea Gantous is a social researcher and recent LLM in Human Rights graduate from the University of Edinburgh. She conducted a research dissertation with the Observatory of Children’s Human Rights Scotland on children’s rights reporting in Scotland under the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014.
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