Rights education and children’s collective self-advocacy through public interest litigation

Abstract

Abstract:If human rights education of schoolchildren addresses advocacy at all, it is mostly or exclusively in terms of civic participation, which perhaps includes civil protest. This approach implicitly discourages young people from considering engaging with the courts as an additional or alternative vehicle in seeking a remedy for violations of their fundamental human rights. Human rights education is incomplete when it fails to address the child's right to legal standing in the effort to seek justice; for instance, as part of a child collective that is significantly adversely and directly impacted by particular government actions. Exemplars of children acquiring legal standing and pursuing their rights through the courts can serve as a useful educational tool in raising awareness of the potential for child public interest advocacy through the courts. One such exemplar, the youth-led class action environmental protection case Abstract: If human rights education of schoolchildren addresses advocacy at all, it is mostly or exclusively in terms of civic participation, which perhaps includes civil protest. This approach implicitly discourages young people from considering engaging with the courts as an additional or alternative vehicle in seeking a remedy for violations of their fundamental human rights. Human rights education is incomplete when it fails to address the child's right to legal standing in an effort to seek justice; for instance, as part of a child collective that is significantly adversely and directly impacted by particular government actions. Exemplars of children acquiring legal standing and pursuing their rights through the courts can serve as a useful educational tool in raising awareness of the potential for child public interest advocacy through the courts. One such exemplar, the youth-led class action environmental protection case Juliana et al. v the United States et al., is discussed.

Children and Youth in Strategic Climate Litigation: Advancing Rights through Legal Argument and Legal Mobilization

“…There is almost a total absence of education for children to inform them of potential legal avenues to remedy infringements of rights. 39 Moreover, the financial burdens of litigation exclude it as a viable option for most, especially for marginalized children. Other barriers are legal.…”

Child‐Led Participation: A Scoping Review of Empirical Studies

“…The projects show different ways and a broad range of children mobilisation: youth-led videos for raising awareness about sex education (Yang & MacEntee, 2015); a game-based approach for promoting children awareness and engagement in environmental urban planning (Giraldo Cadavid, 2018;Polo-Garzón & López-Valencia, 2020), or the use of children drawings for a similar purpose, in relation to climate change (Demneh & Darani, 2020); the use of diverse creative and popular education methods for saving children and adolescents from child labour (Alberto et al, 2012); a sportbased approach for female empowerment (Participedia, 2020b); the use of child-led climate change legal cases for human rights education (Grover, 2018); youth-led protests for defending public schools (King et al, 2018); youth-led participatory budgeting (Augsberger et al, 2019); and the inclusion of children representatives in public debates at national level through different governance structures (Participedia, 2020a). The projects, despite the diverse topics and approaches they show, highlight the importance of children and youth agency, empowerment, and collective action beyond awareness-raising; thus the experiences deal with mobilisation of children and youth as active citizens engaged in public issues they are concerned about, and not only with the (also relevant) appeal to awareness at a cognitive level.…”

Revisiting the Three ‘R’s in Order to Realize Children’s Educational Rights Relationships, Resources, and Redress

“…That said, children's rights can be advanced through civic action and civil protest, not only through litigation, especially considering that the majority of countries in the world do not grant direct access to judicial remedies until the age of 18. 70 Consequently, we argue that redress in this context must be distinguished from litigation: actual cases taken to court to seek a remedy for a breach of children's rights, a process that more closely aligns to the vertical implementation of children and young people's education rights. Education is one of the most frequently litigated areas of human rights in both national and international courts.…”