Paper Titles & Abstracts

There is now a wealth of research and literature relating to, as well as an identifiable legal and policy shift towards securing children's access to justice. This is a particular priority in the European Commission's ongoing pursuit of its EU children's rights Agenda (2011-14), a campaign that dovetails deliberately with the Council of Europe's children's rights strategy. However, efforts to identify the factors that both facilitate and inhibit children's access to justice have focused largely on national civil and criminal justice proceedings. There has been virtually no attempt to consider the extent to which children's claims are brought before supra-national courts, and specifically the Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights.The aim of this paper, therefore, is to explore the extent to which children have brought claims at this level. It will examine the proportion of cases brought by and on behalf of children, the nature of those proceedings, and the way in which the courts deal with such claims. In doing so, the aim is to explore how children can be supported to pursue claims in the European courts, and whether the process is sufficiently accommodating of children's specific needs and vulnerabilities. This demands some consideration of the extent to which European courts' judicial processes are compatible with the child friendly justice measures that the European institutions themselves advocate so strongly at the national level.