European Responses to Global Children's Rights Issues:Exchanging Knowledge and Building Capacity

Children's rights have taken centre stage on the European political, regulatory and research agenda. At EU level, the European Commission published its 'EU Agenda for the Rights of the Child' (2011) proposing concrete action in relation to a range of children's rights priorities, while other key EU institutions (ex. the EU Fundamental Rights Agency) have developed guidance and supported research on children's rights. Underpinning this are some important constitutional developments, including the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (Art. 24), and the Lisbon Treaty (Art. 3 TEU) both of which embed the EU's commitment to protecting children's rights in all its actions. In the same vein, the Council of Europe has embarked on the second phase of its children's rights strategy, 'Building a Europe For and With Children' (2012). The strategy's key objectives are to provide support to national governments to eliminate all forms of violence against children and to protect the rights of children in vulnerable situations. As such, a range of European children's rights measures, including guidance, research and monitoring tools have been developed, whilst a growing body of child-sensitive jurisprudence is emerging from the European courts. Collectively, they represent a far-reaching, Europeanised, children's rights agenda with important implications for the development of national children's rights regimes both within and outside the European region.
Such developments have been greeted with some reservations by academics, NGOs and practitioners alike, however. Concerns have been raised as to the European institutions' insight into and compatibility with the ethical and normative framework underpinning children's rights; at their level of internal expertise or legal capacity to deliver a meaningful response; at their liability to subjugate children's rights to the broader economic and political demands of European integration; and at their ability to respond to the more pervasive children's rights abuses that occur globally, such as armed conflict, poverty or climate change. Further questions have been raised about the European institutions' collaboration with one another or with key international and domestic stakeholders and user-groups to ensure that any measures developed are compatible with and add value to parallel children's rights efforts. The proposed seminar series will provide a unique opportunity for key experts, practitioners and other stakeholders to address all of these issues head on, to exchange knowledge and experience of the current and potential impact of European children's rights measures on the ground, to contribute to the development of a more unified theoretical, ideological, legal and evidential basis for ongoing European initiatives in this area, and to explore new avenues of interdisciplinary enquiry.
To maximise the relevance and impact of the seminar series, the proposed seminar themes respond to ongoing priorities for action at European level, build upon knowledge generated through previous collaborative ventures, and introduce new important avenues of enquiry. Six seminars will cover substantive topics addressing European responses to: 1.Child friendly justice; 2.Violence against children; 3.Protecting children as consumers; 4.Chldren's rights and the global economic crisis; 5.Child migration; 6.Child employment and labour. The 7th seminar will summarise the series and consider future plans.
Cross-cutting questions to be raised in all of seminars include: i. Are such measures sufficiently accommodating of all children regardless of their socio-economic, ethnic background, gender, disability, age, nationality?; ii. How can we maximise their impact on children's rights and experiences on the ground?; iii. Do such activities add value to or undermine parallel international/national initiatives?; iv. How can children be engaged more meaningfully in the development of European children's rights?

Relevant and sustainable knowledge exchange and capacity-building is the key rationale underpinning this seminar series and is central to generating impact.

The beneficiaries of the seminars will include both academics and non-academics. Academic beneficiaries will include those researching in the field of children's rights, European law and politics and social policy. Participation will be drawn from early career academics as well as more established researchers, and will actively recruit PhD students with a view to developing further capacity in this emergent area of enquiry. Non academic beneficiaries will include policy-makers at European and domestic level, children's rights NGOs, practitioners from the legal, social work and education sectors working with children, and, ultimately children and young people themselves.

The seminar series will impact on the beneficiaries in four main ways. First, the seminars will fill an identifiable knowledge gap in the nature, scope and potential of European-level intervention relating to children, particularly among academics and national/local policy-makers. The wide spread of disciplines represented in the series will provide crucial insight into a range of perspectives that this process demands, including EU constitutional law, international and European human rights law and politics, children's rights law and theory, and applied research methodologies. Established and early career academics, along with research students, will not only benefit from the opportunity to meet a range of international academics working in cognate disciplines, but also from the extensive international networking opportunities generated by the series. The series will yield sustainable, academic and knowledge-exchange benefits beyond the life of each seminar also, and beyond the participant group. This will be achieved through selective exposure of materials on the series website; through the development of high quality academic outputs (in the form of edited collections, special issues and briefing papers) and by providing the springboard for the establishment of a strong network of European children's rights experts. PhD students, early career researchers and more experienced academics alike will be encouraged to contribute to all of these activities.
Secondly, the series will allow for clearer communication of the obligations and benefits inherent in European children's rights measures with a view to stimulating more effective implementation, and with a view to identifying areas of further European intervention or restraint. This, in turn, will benefit stakeholders within the European institutions, providing them with a clearer channel of communication with user groups working at the coal face, enabling them to gain greater insights into the effects of existing children's right provision on the ground. Thirdly, the series will impact on international/national stakeholders - identifying ways of working in a more mutually complementary way with European actors towards shared children's rights goals, commensurate with their respective resources, capacity and competences.
The interactive format of the seminar series lends itself to a high degree of interdisciplinary exchange between the various participants. Moreover, the selected topics of the seminars deliberately correspond with current policy priorities at European level with a view to maximising their utility and relevance at the national level.
Better policies and legal measures tailored to children's specific individual and environmental circumstances will generate longer-term, positive effects for the protection of children's rights, ultimately impacting on the societies in which they live.