Legal Strategy

Background

CRIN’s legal work has been at the core of its development since its independence in 2009. Much of the legal work leading up to our independence focused on developing a legal database, collecting case law relevant to children’s rights and producing toolkits such as the Guide to Children’s Rights and Strategic litigation. Our earliest legal campaign activities were aimed at pushing for and supporting the development of a complaints mechanism under the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

With CRIN’s independence the organisation transformed from an information sharing network to a network whose activities are geared towards advocacy, with an explicit focus on new, emerging or controversial issues in children’s rights. It was clear that legal advocacy among children’s rights organisations was far less developed than for other areas of human rights and that CRIN should play a role in promoting a stronger and more legalistic approach to advocacy among the child rights community as a whole. This emphasis is part of our commitment to children’s rights, not charity, and a recognition that human rights standards are international and sometimes also national law. This decision led to CRIN’s mapping of persistent violations by country, to carrying out global research on access to justice and the beginning of its legal advocacy workshops.

Today, CRIN is entering a period of consolidation and focus on what our added value is to the children’s rights and human rights world, as well as how we can make the biggest impact. Having allocated a huge amount of human and financial resources to big research projects in recent years, it has become clear that we are too small to be able to sustain such large projects, but that we should be using our research more systematically in our campaigning and advocacy.

What we plan to do and why

Our legal work is part of our work as a whole. Wherever there is a legal element to any of our policy and advocacy efforts, we intend to support that with legal research and analysis and strive to make this available in all our working languages. Similarly, where we are campaigning, we intend to explore opportunities for legal advocacy, whether we can carry that out ourselves, with others or lay the groundwork for it to take place at a later date.

We also want to promote legal advocacy among other organisations and continue to create tools and host workshops to help them develop this kind of work.

How

1. Monitor patterns of children’s rights violations and match them with avenues of redress

Information is a powerful tool for children’s rights advocacy. Our monitoring is the basis of everything we do. It is through monitoring trends in news and information from our contacts that we are able to speak out and act with authority.

We aim to cover all regions and jurisdictions to:

  • Monitor developments in law reform relevant to children’s rights and the focuses of our policy work, advocacy and campaigning;

  • Monitor legal advocacy on children’s rights around the world;

  • Develop legal resources on emerging children’s rights issues in support of our policy and advocacy work;

  • Analyse gaps in children’s rights advocacy.

2. Advocating for change by:

a. Initiating policy debate

We use our monitoring and research on children’s rights issues to spot trends - positive and regressive - in how children’s rights are addressed or ignored. When we recognise a pattern of violations or a gap in children’s rights advocacy we publish policy and discussion papers to provoke debate and challenge existing thinking.

We will support this work by ensuring that the legal aspects of policy debates we engage in are fully explored as well as tackling overtly legal areas of policy affecting children, such as access to justice. Our legal work aims to:

  • Spark discussion on emerging or neglected children’s rights issues where policy is unclear, non-existent or in need or review;

  • Bring a global perspective to policy discussions with experts from a variety of professions;

  • Bring a legal and rights focused perspective to policy discussions;

  • Take part in discussions affecting children’s rights in international and regional fora.

b. Challenging violations of children’s rights through campaigns and legal advocacy

We want to support and carry out stronger and more ambitious forms of advocacy to secure children’s rights. We are already exploring legal advocacy, but in the coming years we intend to expand this work and explore new forms of advocacy. We will:

  • Bring a legal perspective to our existing campaigns;

  • Carry out legally focused campaigns to improve respect for children’s rights;

  • Run legal advocacy workshops nationally and regionally in order to develop realistic advocacy plans with national partners;

  • Develop guides and resources on legal advocacy and our legal campaign areas to further our work and support other organisations;

  • Explore opportunities to bring complaints, particularly using international complaints mechanisms, as a means of furthering our campaigning.

3. Engaging relevant professionals in our work and documenting processes and experiences for others to replicate.

For our work to be most effective, it must be collaborative. We want to develop existing partnerships and seek out new ones, including with a broader range of professionals - some of whom may not have considered children's rights as relevant to their field.

To make this happen we will:

  • Continue running legal advocacy workshops nationally and regionally in order to develop realistic advocacy plans with national partners;

  • Set up a legal advisory panel to support CRIN’s global advocacy efforts;

  • Create a global network of children’s legal clinics and pro bono lawyers;

  • Develop guides to legal advocacy, campaigning, researching and  monitoring children’s rights, and make these available to different audiences;

  • Continue to work with lawyers to conduct research into court cases around the world that feature the CRC.

How do we know we are having an impact?

The collective nature of our work means that credit for change will always be attributable to multiple actors - as it should be. We may spark an idea or provide evidence to present to those who make the decisions, but national NGOs, government ministers or others then take up the baton.

However, there are various ways we measure our part in advancing children’s rights standards and discourse - in subject, content and language. These include: monitoring how our positions and language are reflected in reports and recommendations at the UN and regional mechanisms, identifying the taking on of our ideas by others in the children's rights community, and tracking feedback from national NGOs about how our work has supported law reform or other developments in their country.