The office of the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland has published our response to the Scottish Government’s consultation on incorporation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).
Consultation response: Incorporation of the UNCRC
Our consultation response to the Scottish Government lays out in detail why the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child must be fully and directly incorporated into Scots law.
Our response highlights four key points:
- that the UNCRC must be incorporated as written,
- that it doesn’t need to be rewritten to be incorporated into Scots law,
- that things need to move quickly for incorporation to happen in this Parliamentary session,
- that incorporation supports and complements wider work on human rights legislation in Scotland as recommended by the First Minister’s Advisory Group on Human Rights Leadership, whose final report supported incorporation of the UNCRC unequivocally.
We’re calling for full and direct incorporation of the UNCRC. That means the whole of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child should end up in Scots law, and that its legal text shouldn’t be changed when this happens.
And this needs to happen urgently.
The Scottish Government is committed to putting the Convention into law before this session of the Scottish Parliament ends— but as that’s in the first half of 2021, there isn’t much time for this to happen.
We’re suggesting a Bill be put before the Scottish Parliament in November 2019: the 30th anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.