Thank you, convener, and happy new year to the committee.
This year is an important one in children’s rights terms. It is the 30th anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which is the international commitment that we made to all children to create a legal framework so that they could all grow up in an environment of happiness, love and understanding.
That speaks very importantly to the work that this committee has been doing on the age of criminal responsibility. Our commitment to children and young people is to keep them all safe, to support them and to keep them from harm, but also, when they conduct harmful behaviour, to make sure that they are treated as children. In particular, article 40 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child calls on all states to treat children who are in conflict with the law in a manner consistent with the child’s rights and respect for the child’s sense of dignity and worth, and which reinforces their respect for the human rights and fundamental freedoms of others, taking into account their age and the desirability of promoting their reintegration and their assuming a constructive role in society.
The age of criminal responsibility is an essential part of that. When we are talking about the harmful behaviour of children and young people, we should see that primarily as a failure of the state; things have gone wrong with the support that the child has had. It concerns me that we sometimes seem to suggest that such harmful behaviour should be an individual responsibility and that the child should be held accountable as if that behaviour was not part of a broader failure. As a number of committee members have said, our growing understanding of adverse childhood experiences and the complexity of some children’s lives means that our focus should be very much on what has happened in the child’s life and treating them as a child.
This is something that the international community has been particularly focused on over the past 30 years. We have spoken about the draft general comment that is currently being considered in Geneva, but it is much broader than that. At the United Nations level, the Human Rights Council—the charter side of the United Nations made up of other member states—has consistently challenged the position in Scotland and the United Kingdom about our very low age of criminal responsibility. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has consistently condemned the fact that Scotland and the UK have an age of criminal responsibility of eight. This committee will take evidence later today from Ann Skelton, a very distinguished human rights defender and member of the UN committee, about that committee’s work.
Over a decade ago, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child developed general comment 10, where it said that, taking into account all of the considerable international evidence, 12 was the absolute minimum and that, based on that strong evidence, the UN committee’s consideration of global trends and our growing understanding of children and young people, 14 or 16 was delivering better results in keeping people safe, reducing crime and treating children and young people as children.
10:30
We have known for a long time about the revision of the general comment, which Ann Skelton will speak to this afternoon. The UN committee was very concerned that states were misinterpreting the general comments to mean that 12 was a target. It was never intended to be so, and the UN committee will be very clear that 14 is the minimum standard for all states parties to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The UN committee is meeting in Geneva as we speak, and it is expected that it will approve that general comment revision, either in this session or, at the latest, in the next session. All of the evidence that has gone into that is available on the UN’s website.
At the Council of Europe level, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe was very clear that for European countries and the 47 members of the Council of Europe, 14 was the standard in 2014, so for European countries, including the UK, that was the standard. As the committee is aware, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatovic, has directly engaged both with ministers and this committee to express her concern that Scotland is not following the Council of Europe’s standard, which has been 14 since at least 2014. The international community could not have been clearer that 14 was the minimum standard, based on all of the international evidence, and that we should look to go further, because the evidence supports that.
The domestic evidence is strong. The additional information that the committee has received from a number of distinguished bodies across civil society and academia in Scotland strongly supports raising the age of criminal responsibility beyond what is currently in the bill. I think that 14 is where we should be, with a view to looking to 16.
The Edinburgh study shows that the global evidence that the UN and the Council of Europe looked at is true in Scotland, so we have domestic evidence. The committee has also heard directly from children and young people, and adults who entered the criminal justice system as young people. All of that speaks very strongly to consideration being given to moving further than the current proposal of 12.