Children face significant consumer risks when surfing online, related to, inter alia, embedded advertisements and privacy-invasive practices, as well as the exploitation of their incredulity and inexperience resulting in overspending or online fraudulent transactions. Behind the fun and playful activities available for children online lie complex revenue models, creating value for companies by feeding children’s data into algorithms and self-learning models to profile them and offer personalised advertising or by nudging children to buy or try to win in-app items to advance in the games they play. In this article we argue that specific measures against these forms of economic exploitation of children in the digital world are urgently needed. We focus on three types of exploitative practices that may have a significant impact on the well-being and rights of children – profiling and automated decision-making, commercialisation of play, and digital child labour. For each type, we explain what the practice entails, situate the practice within the existing legislative and children’s rights framework and identify concerns in relation to those rights.

In recent years, there has been increased attention for the position of adolescents and young adults in the justice system. The Netherlands implemented the Act on Adolescent Criminal Law in 2014, making it possible to sentence young adults up to the age of 23 at the time of the offence as juveniles. This article addresses the most recent Dutch reforms in order to identify key challenges to consider when accommodating young adults in the justice system. It is aimed to highlight the important lessons to be learned from the Dutch experience with a flexible approach to sentencing adolescents and young adults.

The 30 years since the enactment of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child has seen extensive developments in the theory and practice of children’s rights. Children’s rights are now an established academic discipline with the study of children in conflict with the law being a fundamental area of analysis. This paper takes the approach of highlighting three areas of development of children’s rights scholarship in relation to the criminal justice system: children’s rights, developmental science and notable themes emerging from cross-national scholarship, including age limits, diversion, effective participation and deprivation of liberty. In addition, it analyses three gaps or challenges which are “left in the too-hard basket” for the coming decades.

Although the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child recognises procedural rights of the child in addition to substantive rights, it is rather silent on the fundamental right to an effective remedy. The concept of access to justice for children has nevertheless emerged in the past decades and manifested itself firmly in the international human rights and sustainable development agendas. Access to justice is grounded in the right of the child to seek remedies in case of (alleged) rights violations. It implies legal empowerment of children and access to justice mechanisms and remedies that are child-sensitive. So far, access to justice, with a specific focus on children, lacks careful consideration, conceptualisation and contextualisation in academic research and writing. This contribution explores the meaning of access to justice for children, as a right and procedural concept, and paves the way for the development of a more specific research and implementation agenda.

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