Complaint Mechanisms for Children and Adolescents in Out-of-Home Care
2National Crc Monitoring Mechanism Germany, Senior Researcher and Policy Adviser
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN CRC) calls for children to have access to ways to bring individual complaints in addition to the "classic" methods of bringing a legal complaint – the latter being available to children only by way of their parents or legal guardians. This refers to complaint mechanisms that are readily accessible to all children and allow complaints to be handled effectively through child-friendly procedures.
With the entry into force of the individual complaints procedure under the Third Optional Protocol to the Convention, the UN CRC itself has afforded a means for children to bring complaints of this kind to the UN treaty body in Geneva since 2012. Many countries do not currently have a complaint mechanism at the national level comparable to the UN individual complaints procedure, through which both children, irrespective of their age, and adults have the right to bring complaints
Nonetheless, procedures for bringing individual complaints are becoming increasingly widespread in the immediate environment of children, such as at schools and childcare centres. These are often in-house complaint mechanisms though, not complaint receiving bodies of the type envisaged by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in its General Comment No. 2: independent bodies which might, for example, have the authority to instruct other bodies to take specific action.
The presentation / lecture would provide an overview of the specifications of the UN CRC and the Committee on the Rights of the Child as well as the resolution of the UN General Assembly on Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children (A/RES/64/142) and then problematize these in an application-oriented manner for the out-of-home care sector.