Children and young people can be human rights defenders, just like everyone else— but people don’t always realise this is true.
Over the past two years Children’s Parliament and the Commissioner have been working together to highlight the ways that children and young people in Scotland already act as human rights defenders, and to show adults how they can best empower and protect them.
Last night, we jointly launched a toolkit that’s a resource for adults all over the world who work with children and young people. It explains the work we’ve done around child human rights defenders and contains practical activities that will let you carry out a project of your own.
We hope the toolkit will:
- help you recognise when children and young people act as human rights defenders,
- help people of all ages talk together about how adults can empower and protect children and young people when they act in this way,
- give you activities to explore these concepts with children,
- help children be more involve in making decisions that affect them— in their towns, in their country, and across the world.