If you’re a secondary school teacher looking for resources for young people around their human rights, we’ve produced a lot of them which can:
- help young people understand the Commissioner’s role and work in promoting and protecting their rights,
- help give young people more information about their rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) itself,
- help young people find out about what’s happening to make the rights in the Convention a reality for them here in Scotland.
About the Commissioner
Commissioner Bruce Adamson works to promote and protect the human rights of every young person and child across Scotland. They’re independent of Government and Parliament, and their role and powers are set out within Scots law.
Young advisers
The Commissioner works with over 40 young people who act as young advisers involved with the work of our office.
About young people’s rights
Our website has explanations of the first 42 Articles of the UNCRC written in plain English so they can be easily understood.
More around young people’s human rights
European Convention on Human Rights
The European Convention on Human Rights is a law that enshrines certain rights and freedoms in the Member States of the Council of Europe.
Human rights monitoring
As part of the UK, Scotland has made many human rights promises to children and young people. Human rights monitoring is how we make sure they keep them.
The International Human Rights Framework
Children and young people’s rights are part of a system protecting the rights of everyone in the world: the International Human Rights Framework.
Information on young people’s rights in Scotland
Coronavirus
Information on children’s human rights during the coronavirus pandemic in Scotland and what our office is doing to protect these rights during the crisis.
Answering young people’s questions
Young people often have questions around how their human rights work, and sometimes it can be hard to find out the answers.
So we’ve produced a searchable series of FAQs to answer some of the questions we’re most commonly asked.
Our FAQs include:
- definitions of terms often used in human rights law,
- advice if your human rights aren’t being respected,
- explainers that go into more detail around human rights questions and concepts,
- case studies of specific rights issues for young people and how to tackle them here in Scotland,
- information about the Commissioner’s office and how it works.
If young people want to know more about an issue that’s not covered here, you can contact us and we’ll see if we can add it.
Our work explained for young people
Many of the major pieces of work produced by our office have children and young people’s versions to help explain what they’re about and what their findings were.
Every year, we also produce an annual report for children and young people to explain what we’ve been doing. Our report for 2020/21 will be ready soon, and you can read our report for 2019/20 now.