The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) has submitted comments to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child regarding the Draft General Comment No. 27 on children’s rights to access to justice and to an effective remedy.
The submission emphasises that access to justice must be grounded in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and should be approached in a child-sensitive, child-specific, and intersectional manner. It highlights the need for legal systems to recognize children’s evolving capacities and particular vulnerabilities and to ensure that all rights protected under the CRC are ultimately justiciable.
The submission calls for strengthened guarantees relating to child-friendly procedures, meaningful participation, the availability of judicial remedies, and consistency with the broader framework of international human rights law.
Key points of the submission include:
- Justice systems must go beyond formal access and must be designed to be child-sensitive, child-specific, and responsive to the psychological, emotional, and developmental needs of children.
- Children’s right to access to justice must not be seen as separate from general human rights protections. Rather, it must be fully embedded within international human rights law frameworks and treated as an integral and enforceable right for all children.
- Certain violations of children’s rights necessarily require judicial remedies, and that all non-judicial mechanisms must still guarantee the availability of judicial recourse when needed.
- All children’s rights must ultimately be justiciable, and States cannot arbitrarily determine which remedies are available. Legal systems must be structured so that children can meaningfully access courts when their rights are violated.
- Discrimination is a major structural barrier to justice for children. Both direct and indirect – including intersectional – forms of discrimination must be addressed. Children can be affected by discrimination targeting their parents or communities.
- The ICJ recommends clearer safeguards to ensure that children are supported throughout legal proceedings, including access to trained legal representatives, qualified interpreters, child-competent professionals, and independent guardians where necessary.
- Children must have transparent, understandable information about procedures and the roles of professionals involved, to build trust and foster meaningful participation.
- The new General Comment should explicitly reference existing CRC General Comments, Concluding Observations, and other jurisprudence in the final text, to ensure that it is anchored in the Committee’s established work.
Read the full submission here
