In Scotland, the Children and Young People’s Commissioner’s job is to be a fierce champion for children and to protect and promote children’s human rights. During the coronavirus pandemic, the Commissioner, along with many other people, saw that both the United Kingdom Government and the Scottish Government had made lots of new laws very quickly to protect people from the risk of the virus, and to protect their human rights to life and health. But they had not completed CRIAs for many of these new laws to think about their impact on children’s human rights.
The Commissioner asked a group of children’s rights experts called the Observatory of Children’s Human Rights Scotland to do their own Children’s Rights Impact Assessment (CRIA) on the new laws. Because this CRIA was not done by the adults who made these new laws, the Observatory called it an Independent CRIA.
This Independent CRIA shows what the Scottish Government still needs to do to protect children’s rights. It also shows where their decisions have made positive and negative changes for children.
Where they have made positive changes, the Observatory can say so. Where they have made negative changes, they can be challenged to make things better.
