Legal Advocacy Workshop Toolkit

CRIN and partners have begun to facilitate a series of national and regional workshops to explore how CRIN can most usefully support national level campaigns and encourage the use of stronger forms of advocacy - including legal action and advocacy - to challenge violations of children’s rights. In particular, we want to encourage those involved (or potentially involved) in children’s rights advocacy to review persistent serious violations and consider all possible forms of advocacy, including legal action and advocacy, to challenge them. We believe a systematic process like this is needed in most states, but has as yet only been pursued in few.

We believe in working openly and freely sharing resources. This note is a starting point for sharing our experiences and resources from running these workshops with others thinking about organising their own legal advocacy workshops. Our plan is to produce a global legal advocacy guide along with a toolkit in the future to further support others in running similar workshops without our direct involvement.

Disclaimer: This guide is from CRIN's archive site, some of the info might not be up-to-date. We are currently still editing these PDFs.

Background

Guided by our passion for social and legal change, Child Rights International Network (CRIN) is building a global network for children's rights. We press for rights, not charity, and advocate for a genuine systemic shift in how governments and societies view children. Our inspiration is the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which we use to bring children's rights to the top of the international agenda. We launch advocacy campaigns, work as part of international coalitions, and strive to make existing human rights enforcement mechanisms accessible for all.

In recent years, CRIN has been moving from being an information network towards becoming a network focussed more clearly on supporting children’s rights advocacy. Up to now this has largely been achieved through providing more advocacy-focussed materials, targeting CRIN’s output towards those in a position to pursue active advocacy and launching some specific petitions and campaigns through our website.

It is very clear from the CRC reporting procedure and from many reports by NGOs, human rights institutions, UN agencies and others that serious violations of a wide variety of children’s rights persist in most states in all regions. It is also clear that traditional forms of advocacy – situation analysis, report writing, lobbying of governments and parliaments, use of the media, briefing of human rights mechanisms, etc. – are not having sufficient impact in many states on many serious violations. For example, successive concluding observations on states’ reports from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child have failed to provoke necessary legal reforms and other government action.

In light of this, CRIN and partners began facilitating a series of national and regional workshops to explore how CRIN can most usefully support national level campaigns and encourage the use of stronger forms of advocacy - including legal action and advocacy - to challenge violations of children’s rights. In particular, we want to encourage those involved (or potentially involved) in children’s rights advocacy to review persistent serious violations and consider all possible forms of advocacy, including legal action and advocacy, to challenge them. We believe a systematic process like this is needed in most states, but has as yet only been pursued in few.

Previous workshops

The aim of CRIN’s workshops is to provide a space for legal and nonlegal children’s rights advocates, as well as advocates working on human rights more generally, to meet, discuss and devise legal advocacy strategies for advancing children’s rights. At these events, campaigners address recurring and persistent violations of children's rights in their country or region. Through supported and organised discussion, they examine the options for challenging these violations, identify the legal blockages to improving the situation and create a concrete plan of action for taking legal advocacy forward.

To date, we have held three such workshops.

The first of these, a national workshop in Turkey during October 2011, focussed inter alia on corporal punishment and children’s economic and social rights. It has since seen great successes in the follow-up work of its participants who have received funding to continue the work on the plans developed during the workshop.
This was followed by a regional workshop in Nepal in May 2013 with participants from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Bangladesh which focused inter alia on juvenile justice and trafficking of children.
In January 2015, our latest workshop to date took place in Tanzania and participants from Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya discussed a range of regional persistent violations of children’s rights, including issues such as privatisation of education and ritual killings of children with albinism.

We are now planning to run similar workshops in other countries and regions.

Further information about past workshops is available on our website under the following link:https://www.crin.org/en/home/law/legal-advocacy/legal-advocacy-workshops.

Workshop aims

The following overall aims guide the concept of CRIN’s legal advocacy workshops:

Review an agreed selection of persistent violations of children’s rights affecting different groups of children and different settings of children’s lives (such as right to health, right to education, juvenile justice, corporal punishment, child marriage, harmful traditional practices etc.) and “match” them with possible forms of legal or quasi-legal advocacy;
Identify what is needed to use these forms of advocacy (for example, do individual child victims have to be identified to bring a claim, are appropriately trained and experienced lawyers available and are sufficient resources available to support legal action?);
Identify what obstacles there are to using these and any other stronger forms of advocacy;
Discuss what CRIN can do to encourage and support these forms of advocacy in each country.

How CRIN can help you moving forward

Remember that you are not alone in campaigning for children’s rights. CRIN can offer information and tools for advocacy, many of which are online. As part of your planning process for legal advocacy or your own workshop, you could consider using some of the following resources:

Access to justice for children report for your country, which sets out the status of the CRC under national law, how the law treats children involved in legal proceedings, the legal means available to challenge violations of children’s rights, and the practical considerations in challenging violations using the legal system. All reports are available here: https://www.crin.org/en/home/law/access.
Subscription to our online newsletter “Children in Court CRINmail” which covers examples of strategic litigation. You can subscribe here: https://www.crin.org/en/home/what-we-do/ crinmail.
The Legal Database, a searchable database of examples of how the CRC has been used by high-level courts in all regions and other significant children’s rights cases. The Legal Database can be found here: https://www.crin.org/en/library/custom-search-legal.
Strategic litigation case studies, available here: https://www.crin.org/en/home/law/ strategic-litigation/strategic-litigation-case-studies.
The Children's Rights Wiki which brings together recommendations made by UN and regional human rights bodies, decisions by national courts and advocacy work carried out by national child rights advocates in one place. It can be found here: http://wiki.crin.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=Main_Page. Each country page also includes a national law section, including a general overview of the country's legal system, the status of the CRC in national law, provisions for children’s rights in the Constitution, a sense of relevant legislation/case law, a guide on how to conduct detailed legal research, and an analysis of the country's legal compliance with the CRC as assessed by the Committee on the Rights of the Child.
CRIN’s guides and toolkits which can be found here: https://www.crin.org/en/guides.
- Guide to strategic litigation aimed at legal and nonlegal NGO staff which can be adapted to local settings and procedures.
- Guide explaining how to use UN and regional human rights mechanisms to pursue children's rights advocacy.
- Legal assistance toolkit which outlines that legal assistance for children should not be viewed as a luxury, but must be recognised as a human right.
- CRC complaints mechanism toolkit on how to use the CRC complaints mechanism under the third Optional Protocol to the CRC.
- Challenging discrimination toolkit on diverse areas of discrimination against children and how to successfully challenge them.
- Media toolkit on how to get your message across and depicting children in a way that promotes their rights.
- Child-friendly justice toolkit on children as victims, witnesses, offenders or complainants.
- Inhuman sentencing toolkit which details advocacy ideas for organisations or individuals in States subjecting children to inhuman sentencing.
- Child sexual abuse and the Holy See campaign toolkit which constituted CRIN’s first step in our campaign for transparency, accountability and reform in the Catholic Church.

Other support by CRIN for national organisations includes: hosting campaigns on the CRIN website and providing news coverage of national advocacy efforts.

How to build a legal advocacy strategy

We have developed a checklist to support participants attending CRIN’s workshops in coming up with their own legal advocacy strategy and invite anyone planning to hold their own legal advocacy workshop to use it. The following outline includes many of the essential questions which will likely come up when brainstorming a plan of action for using the law to challenge children’s rights violations. It has been tried and tested at our previous workshops and amended taking into account comments by participants.

During CRIN’s workshop on child rights advocacy in Turkey, for example, a group working on corporal punishment identified a specific article of the Turkish Penal Code which needed to be challenged, and set out a plan to take this issue to the constitutional court and then, if necessary, to the European Court of Human Rights. Once they had decided on a target and a pathway for their campaign, they were able to begin planning for the specific actions they would need to take in order to achieve their target - i.e. the preparation of legal opinions, liaising with state authorities, involvement of the legislature and the judiciary and fulfilling the conditions for appealing to regional human rights bodies.

1. Identify violations of children's rights.

National/regional/international context
Which specific rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) are violated?
Is this an issue which is relevant to other international bodies or UN projects, such as the UN Secretary General’s Study on Violence Against Children?

2. Identify why the violation is persisting and why previous and existing forms of advocacy have failed to achieve effective remedies.

Different political or societal pressures
Previous advocacy efforts and why and to what extent they have failed

3. Identify what forms of legal or quasi-legal advocacy could be used to challenge the violation, what conditions need to be met before these can be used and what other obstacles there are to using these forms of advocacy, looking especially at the national constitution and legal system, and regional as well as international human rights mechanisms.

Relevant courts and other complaints mechanisms
National/regional/international level
Court standards and procedures, including preconditions
Legal or practical obstacles to using these forms of advocacy (lack of legal standing for NGOs in court, lack of judicial independence, negative legal precedent, etc)?
Examples of successful litigation brought against other rights violations in your country, e.g. campaigns relating to the rights of women and ethnic or religious minorities
Other avenues to challenge child rights violations (publicising efforts in the media, seeking political support, social and political campaigns, etc)

4. Identify the evidence that exists of the violation you have identified, how it can be gathered and how it can be used.

How can this evidence be gathered?
Who will need to be involved in the collection process?
What problems might emerge?
Are the violations taking place in closed and private settings? Is there some public method for investigation and evidence gathering?
Are individual child victims required to bring a claim, and are they willing to come forward and give evidence?
What are the requirements for witnesses and what are the potential risks in giving evidence?
Are there any potential limitations on children’s ability to give evidence or appear in court?

5. Identify what resources are going to be needed to mount the challenge.

How will you acquire or attract funding and other necessary resources for your project?
Do you have sufficient legal expertise within your organisation, or should you be looking to enlist others to advise?
Will you need partners in other areas of the country?
Can you spare the staff time, or should you be looking for volunteers to help keep the campaign going?
If bringing a court case, are you or your client(s) entitled to legal aid or will you require pro bono legal assistance?

6. Identify possible partners to work with on this issue.

Activists, rights defenders, groups of or individual legal professionals, pro bono law firms, other NGOs, international organisations, members of political and social movements, children, parents/guardians, teachers, etc
Anyone else you need in order to fill some of the gaps you identified in the previous section on necessary resources
Do you already have contact with these partners or will you need to approach them directly or prepare an outreach campaign?
Are there reasons that important partners might hesitate to get involved, and what can you do to encourage them to join your efforts?

7. Develop a concrete plan to move forward with the advocacy.

Identify the key steps you will need to take to get your legal advocacy campaign going
What order will they need to be addressed in?
Agree on: the overall focus and the specific objectives of the campaign (such as overturning, revising or calling for the creation of a particular law), the time scale and what resources you can put into the campaign
Begin a preliminary division of work
Think about specific opportunities to be taken into account (upcoming political or legal developments, appointments to public offices, national events, national days of remembrance or international awareness days, elections, referendums, legal reforms, court cases likely to be resolved in the coming months with potential of setting precedents or bringing attention to related human rights violations, etc)

8. Identify how CRIN can help you move forward with advocacy on this issue.

Guides, toolkits and reports
Information sharing
Subscription to online newsletter “Children in Court CRINmail”
Legal database
Hosting campaigns on CRIN website
Providing news coverage of national advocacy efforts

Legal advocacy workshops

Traditional forms of campaigning for children’s rights have not done enough. The children’s rights community needs to start using stronger forms, such as legal advocacy, to advance children’s rights. By legal advocacy we mean using the law to address children’s rights violations. It could be that a law itself actually breaches children’s rights (eg laws allowing parents to physically punish their children) or there could be a gap in the law.

We need to get the law right first. Only then will children be able to enjoy all their human rights.

Legal advocacy workshop programme

To promote the use of legal advocacy around the world, we have started a programme of workshops where legal and non-legal children’s rights advocates meet to discuss and devise legal advocacy strategies for advancing children’s rights.

At these events, campaigners address recurring and persistent violations of children's rights in their country or region. Through supported and organised discussion, they examine the options for challenging these violations, identify the legal blockages to improving the situation and create a concrete plan of action for taking legal advocacy forward.

To date, we have held four such workshops. The first of these, a national workshop in Turkey during October 2011, focussed inter alia on corporal punishment and children’s economic and social rights. It has since seen great successes in the follow-up work of its participants who have received funding to continue the work on the plans developed during the workshop. This was followed by a regional workshop in Nepal in May 2013 with participants from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Bangladesh which focussed inter alia on juvenile justice and trafficking of children. In January 2015, our workshop took place in Tanzania and participants from Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya discussed a range of regional persistent violations of children’s rights, including issues such as privatisation of education and ritual killings of children with albinism. In May 2015 we held our latest workshop in Ukraine, where national advocates for children's rights have discussed issues of children with disabilities and Roma children as well as violence against children and their access to justice. We are planning to run similar workshops in other countries and regions.

We believe in working openly and freely sharing resources. Based on our experiences and resources from running these workshops, our plan is to produce a global legal advocacy guide along with a toolkit in which each country workshop will feature as case study so other campaigners can run similar workshops without our direct involvement. In the meantime, please refer to our summary toolkit on how to set up your own legal advocacy workshop.

Where can I find out more?

The best place to start is with CRIN's reports from our workshops:

You may also wish to consult CRIN's summary toolkit on how to set up your own legal advocacy workshop.

If you have any further questions, you can make an enquiry at info@crin.org.

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