Provisions requiring a child rights impact assessment
Source: FRA, 2014
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.