29 Oct Who Gets to Be Heard? Children’s Participation before the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child
[Rachel J. Schoner is an Assistant Professor at Tulane University specializing in international law, international organizations, and human rights.
Andrea Vilán is an Assistant Professor at American University specializing in international law, human rights, and transnational activism.]
The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child recently held its 101st session in Geneva. The session highlights both the expansion of opportunities for children to participate in international human rights institutions and the barriers that determine who ultimately ends up being heard.
The 101st session of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC or hereafter “the Committee”) is a much welcome milestone following several years of cancelled sessions. While most attention was on the periodic monitoring of the Committee on the reports of Lesotho, Timor Leste, Tanzania, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Slovenia, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan, or the adoption of General Comment 27 on children’s access to justice and to an effective remedy (posted on the provisional agenda), we highlight direct children’s participation as a method of access to justice.
We argue that individual petition mechanisms, an often-overlooked component of the treaty body system and a relatively new addition to the Committee on the Rights of the Child (detailed below), has provided favorable outcomes to children alongside its challenges of children’s agency and manipulation. Examining children’s participation by submitting petitions helps understand the impact of the Committee, advancing justice and providing victims remedies, as it faces increasing constraints.
From its creation in 1989 to monitor the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Committee invited children to participate by submitting information and participating in events. For decades, however, children lacked the direct, legal access present in other treaty bodies, unable to submit formal complaints that the treaty body would consider and decide if the state had breached the Convention.
After years of debate, the UN granted children individual access in the Committee on the Rights of the Child in the form of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on a communications procedure (OPIC). We detail this petition mechanism, how many states have ratified OPIC allowing children’s access, who participates by filing petitions, what the petitions are about, well-founded agency concerns and access to minors alongside favorable decisions. We draw on our recently published research analyzing all 164 decisions on petitions filed between April 2014 and February 2025, showing that while the Committee does provide favorable outcomes, debates of children’s agency throughout OPIC negotiations were well-founded.
Children’s Access in the Committee on the Rights of the Child
Children’s access and participation have been front and center of the Committee’s work since its inception. The Committee identifies several avenues for child participation, including the reporting process, days of general discussion, development of general comments, in-country visits, and other commemorative events. Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child protects the children’s right to be heard, and the Committee’s General Comment No. 12 (2009)expands upon this right.
For decades, however, other UN treaty bodies had individual petition mechanisms allowing direct, legal access for victims while children were overlooked. After prolonged debate and concerns of children’s agency and access to international mechanisms, in 2011 the UN adopted the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on a communications procedure (OPIC). The OPIC entered into force in 2014. Notably, states must consent and opt-in to this mechanism. To date, less than 1/3 of States Parties to the Convention (54) are also States Parties to OPIC. As the Committee reaches its 101st session, we look at how children have participated with this new mechanism in its first 12 years.
The most notable use of this new petition mechanism was when 16 children including Greta Thunberg filed complaints against five countries (Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany and Türkiye) for failing to act in the climate crisis. The children, with the help of Earthjustice and law firm Hausfeld LLP, targeted the top five emitters who are States Parties to OPIC. After a few years, the Committee deemed the petitions inadmissible for failing to exhaust domestic remedies. Despite this unfavorable decision, the Committee was sympathetic and released unprecedented open letter to the authors, “to acknowledge the importance of your actions in bringing this historic case to the Committee on the Rights of the Child” and to applaud their “courage and determination.” This letter previewed the Committee’s later General Comment 26 linking children’s rights to the environment with a specific focus on climate change. Although the specific communications were not successful in decisions, these complaints did attract global attention and brought this new issue to the Committee.
The recent session helped address the significant backlog faced by the Committee given the rising number of submissions and the cancellation of previous meetings due to the liquidity crisis. At its 100th session in January 2026 the Committee on the Rights of the Child decided individual communications filed against Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Lithuania, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. In this fall’s 101st session, the Committee considered 16 individual complaints filed against Belgium, Czech Republic, Finland, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and Türkiye. There is still 78 cases pendingconsideration before the Committee.
Who Participates? And About What?
The 54 OPIC States Parties are concentrated in Europe and Latin America. European countries have received the most petitions. Top countries are Spain, Switzerland, and Denmark.
What are children petitioning about? Reading through the 164 decisions reveal a puzzling pattern. Despite the broad scope of children’s rights covered in the treaty, most complaints—nearly ¾—concern migration. Other petitions cover climate change, family reunification, discrimination, education, and healthcare. Age verification procedures, where destination countries determine the age of migrants upon arrival, have been a central topic of petitioners.
Agency and Access Concerns
Throughout negotiations on adding a petition mechanism to the Convention the Rights of the Child, there were concerns of agency. Compared to other existing petitioning mechanisms, granting access to children prompt further questions of agency, exploitation, and involvement of adults who may or may not have the best interest of the child. OPIC negotiations reveal that many were concerned about adopting a child-friendly mechanism to provide true access to children. Dependence on adults makes it more difficult for children to access remedies, and guardianship continues to be scrutinized in ensuring children’s right to be heard. We show that these agency concerns were well-founded.
Research has shown that victims of human rights abuse face significant barriers accessing international mechanisms, particular knowledge about the institution. Legal counsel plays a key role in not only informing victims about international remedies and assisting them throughout the process. For children, there are increased concerns if they are knowledgeable and able to provide full consent to participation.
Our recently published research shows that, in the first 12 years of OPIC, nearly all child petitioners (164 communications) have legal representation (92%). Compared to ongoing research collecting all submissions to and decisions of all UN treaty bodies, the involvement of counsel in the Committee on the Rights of the Child is notably higher than all other treaty bodies.
Additionally, we consider the age of children at the time of submission and involvement of parents or other adults. In addition to noting the age of child(ren) at time of submission, decisions also indicate whether the child was an author of the petition, or if the communication was submitted by another individual such as a family member. Our research reveals that the child is an author in over half of complaints, but this varies by age. Older children are more likely to be authors of the petitions, whereas younger children are more likely to only be listed as victims and not authors. Where the child is not the author, nearly all (about 9/10) petitions are from the child’s parent(s). These findings reveal that initial concerns about children’s ability to submit petitions freely and potential manipulation by parents or guardians are well-founded, particularly for younger children.
Figure 1 Children’s Age at the Time of Submission
Favorable Decisions
Despite concerns of agency, Committee decisions usually favor petitioners. In addition to violation decisions where the Committee determines the government did violate treaty provisions, we argue that discontinuances are an often-overlooked favorable decision. Discontinuances are the most common outcome, followed by violation, and inadmissible, and rarely no violation.
Publicly available decisions usually detail the reason for the discontinuance. Most often, the Committee decides to discontinue the communication because the victim(s) received sufficient recourse from the state before the Committee decided on the merits. Therefore, this interim remedy is a favorable decision. For example, in Communication 168/2022,the author and her son were granted Finnish residence permits and no longer faced the risk of deportation before the Committee ruled on the merits, so the author requested that the Committee discontinue the communication.
In other, less frequent cases, the communication has been discontinued because the Committee or legal counsel lost contact with the author. By reading the publicly available discontinued decisions, we can distinguish favorable and unfavorable discontinuances. Favorable discontinuances are more common than unfavorable ones. Considering these remedied discontinuances and violation decisions as both favorable compared to inadmissible or no violation decisions, most petitions across in all years result in favorable outcomes for children. We note that violation decisions do not necessarily mean compliance or any personalized remedy, but this is an intermediate and necessary step, to find government wrongdoing.
In short, submissions by children to the Committee on the Rights often result in positive outcomes.
Figure 2 Outcomes in the Committee on the Rights of the Child
Figure 3 Favorable Decisions over Time
Challenges and the Road Ahead
Our research shows the positive outcomes the Committee delivers, alongside the challenges it faces in reaching child victims. Despite the Committee on the Rights of the Child’s favorable decisions, our findings reinforce concerns about “child-friendly justice” and access to justice for children. The Committee recognizes these practical concerns, devoting its 27th General Comment to this children’s access to justice and effective remedy. We applaud this as a productive step forward, yet institutional reforms and changes in practices should accompany this effort.
Younger children are less likely to author petitions, highlighting potential barriers to their direct participation. Children are nearly always accompanied by adults, who may or may not prioritize their best interests. Legal representation helps children file petitions, but are the petitions truly in the children’s best interests, or do the motives of lawyers and advocacy organizations shape the decision-making? We join others in calling for careful attention and resources devoted to making activities of the Committee accessible to children, such as producing child-friendly language and materials.
Over the last 12 years, OPIC has given children direct access to a remedy they might otherwise lack. This mechanism has produced favorable decisions that not only recognize victims and acknowledge government wrongdoing but also contribute to personal remedies. Through OPIC, the Committee on the Rights of the Child has pushed states to reconsider policies and practices, contributing to improvement in child welfare and children’s rights around the world.
Yet UN treaty bodies face shrinking resources and growing backlogs, and the Committee is no exception: sessions have been cancelled and the secretariat has shrunk. The deeper threat is to independent monitoring: as resources shrink, so does the capacity of bodies like the Committee on the Rights of the Child to hold states accountable, a trend that suits states wary of scrutiny. A recent Leiden Law Blog post by Ann Skelton and Ton Liefaard captures the state of the “stretched, but not broken” institution: “But if the international system for protecting children’s rights is left to operate on cancelled sessions and stretched staff, we should be honest about what that means. Not a technical failure, a political one.”
We call on states to sustain and expand resources for the Committee on the Rights of the Child and individual petition mechanisms across all treaty bodies.