CLEAR-Rights Advocacy Brief

The six partner organisations in the project CLEAR-Rights: Enhancing legal assistance and access to justice for children in conflict with the law in Europe would like to recommend to European governments and particularly the Ministers of Justice - in close cooperation with the bar associations - to review and, if necessary, to improve the criteria that a lawyer should comply with for accreditation to provide legal assistance to children in conflict with the law. This Advocacy Brief aims to contribute to this process of review and improvement, and contains a set of recommendations about what the minimum accreditation criteria should be in the key areas of education, certification or license, values, work experience, and continuous training. It also contains information about children’s views, the international legal framework and, by way of examples of good practice, the accreditation systems of Belgium and the Netherlands. The content of this Advocacy Brief is based on the CLEAR-Rights project’s European review of practices and gaps in legal aid systems for children in Belgium, France, Hungary, Romania & The Netherlands (2021), and input from the project’s partner organisations, Technical Expert Group and Child Advisory Boards.

The project CLEAR-Rights: Enhancing legal assistance and access to justice for children in conflict with the law in Europe is a two-year project (January 2021 to December 2022) co-funded by the Justice Programme of the European Union. The CLEAR-Rights project is coordinated by the Regional Office of Terres des hommes for Europe in Hungary, in collaboration with 5 partners: PILnet in Hungary; Alliance of Lawyers for Human Rights (Alliance des Avocats pour les droits de l’homme) (AADH) in France; Defence for Children International (DCI) in Belgium; Terre des hommes Romania; and Defence for Children International - ECPAT in the Netherlands. Its overall objective is to improve equal access to a lawyer for children suspected or accused of crime, through strengthening access to quality and specialized government-funded legal aid and pro bono legal assistance, in line with Articles 6 and 18 of Directive (EU) 2016/800. One of its specific objectives is to increase the awareness of policy makers and service providers on the right of children suspected or accused of crime to access quality legal assistance and benefit from a permanent legal assistance system.

Please find below the CLEAR-Rights Advocacy Brief in English, in Dutch, in Hungarian, in Romanian, and in French.