Children's Rights Judgments Network

The Children's Rights Judgments Network will support the collaboration of up to 50 children's rights scholars from across the world in revisiting existing legal cases and re-drafting them from a children's rights perspective. The rewritten judgments will help to illuminate the conceptual and practical challenges of securing children's rights within judicial decision-making and will explore how developments in theory and practice can inform and (re)invigorate the legal protection of children's rights. Each judgment will be accompanied by a commentary explaining the historical and legal context of the original case and the rationale underpinning the revised judgment including: the particular children's rights perspective adopted; the extent to which it addresses the children's rights deficiencies evident in the original judgment; and the potential impact the alternative version might have had on law, policy or practice.

This very modern, applied approach to legal scholarship is inspired by similar highly successful projects, such as the Feminist Judgments Project (2010). The Children's Rights Judgments Project is unique in that it illustrates precisely how children's rights can be integrated into judicial reasoning across a range of legal areas including health, administrative, education, immigration, family, child protection and criminal justice. Moreover, it explores this in a number of jurisdictional contexts, looking at how children's rights can inform deliberations in different national courts across the world, as well as in the international courts (the European Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights, and the International Criminal Court).

Leading children's rights academics will work alongside early career researchers to produce the judgments and commentaries. Judgment writing is a challenging and skillful process, demanding a balanced consideration not just of the rights and interests of children, but of other parties implicated in a particular case. Thus, the network will draw on the experience and guidance of two judges, and early drafts of the judgments will also be subjected to the scrutiny of other legal practitioners, representatives from the NGO sector and children and young people with a view to testing their feasibility and comprehensiveness. Other interested parties who are not participating in the network can follow progress on a dedicated Children's Rights Judgments website, which will include a reading list of seminal children's rights literature and good practice examples of existing children's rights judgments.

The judgments and commentaries will be published as an edited collection which will be launched at the annual Socio-Legal Studies Association Conference in April 2017.

Demonstrating how children's rights norms and theories can inform judicial decision-making is the key rationale underpinning this network and is central to generating impact. In addition to the academic beneficiaries referred to in the previous section, non-academic beneficiaries will include judges, lawyers and children's rights campaign NGOs operating at domestic, European and International level. Ultimately, the outputs from the project will impact upon children and young people also.

The network will impact on the beneficiaries in four main ways.

First, the process of judgment writing will fill an important gap between academic and applied law. It will illustrate to those charged with applying and interpreting the law how the intelligence we have gained about children's lives, perspectives and rights, generated through a rich body of research, can be brought to bear more effectively on judicial reasoning.

Second, the network will add a new dimension to the emergent legal method of judgment writing, demonstrating its application in an entirely new theoretical and normative framework.

Third, the interactive format of the workshops supporting the network lends itself to a high degree of exchange between the various participants, and a distinctly collegial approach to the judgment writing. This will help to nurture strong collaborative links between children's rights scholars and practitioners at various points in their career, and stimulate open dialogue with non-academic stakeholders working in children's rights litigation and campaigning. It will simultaneously demystify the academic process as well as the judicial adjudicative process, whilst also exposing some of the stark challenges associated with balancing competing interests of the various parties implicated in cases.

Finally, it is hoped that the production of revised judgments and explanatory commentaries that respond more explicitly to children's rights will demonstrate to the judiciary the possibilities inherent in a child-rights-based approach, inspire more creative, strategic litigation among practitioners and campaigners, and generate longer-term, positive effects for the protection of children's rights.