Child rights impact assessment

Child rights impact assessment is a tool predicting the impact of any proposed law, policy or budgetary allocation, which affects children and the enjoyment of their rights. Child impact assessment needs to be built into government at all levels and as early as possible in the development of policies and laws.

Provisions requiring a child rights impact assessment

Source: FRA, 2014

Key findings

  • Specific requirements on a child rights impact assessment exist only in a few EU Member States.
  • In some Member States, child rights impact assessment is part of the existing human rights or social impact assessment.
  • When in place, child rights impact assessment is often limited to laws and policies targeting children and directly affecting them; it is, nonetheless, not carried out for laws, policies and administrative decisions that might affect them indirectly.
  • Child rights impact assessment is not systematically conducted by all national, regional and local authorities whose decisions directly or indirectly affect children.

Only six EU Member States (Austria, Belgium, Finland, Italy, Sweden and the United Kingdom) have specific provisions requiring that a child rights impact assessment takes place when developing laws and policies, and taking administrative decisions regarding children. Some Members States, such as Spain, are moving towards the introduction of such requirements.

The absence of any such requirements does not necessarily mean that no child rights impact assessment is ever conducted. In many Member States, the child rights impact assessment is part of the human rights or social impact assessment, as for example in Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Latvia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Romania. Some of them (Denmark and Estonia) specifically list child rights, while others (the Czech Republic and Poland) do not specifically reference child rights but list children with other vulnerable groups.

In some Member States, such as Ireland, the mandate of the ombudsperson for children includes the requirements of conducting a child rights impact assessment whenever a new law or policy is developed and drawing attention to possible impacts. However, whether this is done systematically and whether it takes place for all policies and laws that directly or indirectly affect children depends on the financial and human resources allocated to the ombudsperson’s offices.