Felicia Szloboda, Human Rights Project Manager, explores how UNCRC Incorporation and Scotland's Human Rights Bill are shaping a rights-based approach in local government, and what councils can do now to prepare for an evolving human rights landscape.
Across Scotland, growing attention to children’s rights and human rights in legislation and policy is increasing obligations and expectations on local authorities to take a rights-based approach to planning services, making decisions and improving outcomes. This is a welcome development, but it has also created some confusion.
In practice, children’s rights and human rights are sometimes spoken about as if they are separate things. In the Scottish context, this is understandable. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Incorporation) (Scotland) Act 2024 gives specific legal force to children’s rights, while wider proposals for a Human Rights Bill have developed on a parallel track. This can encourage separate conversations, separate workstreams and separate language.
For local government, however, it is important to be clear: children’s rights are human rights.
Why the distinction has emerged
Children have always held human rights. What the UNCRC does is not create a different category of rights, but set out how human rights apply to children, taking account of their particular circumstances, development, dependence on adults, and need for protection, provision and participation.
The separate focus on children’s rights has had real value. It has helped make children more visible in law, policy and practice. It has encouraged public bodies to pay closer attention to children’s views, best interests, development and access to services. It has also challenged a long-standing tendency to design policy around adults and then assume children will benefit automatically.
That said, when children’s rights are framed as something separate from human rights, there is a risk of creating an unhelpful divide.
Why this matters for local government
Local authorities do not deliver rights in neat categories. They make decisions every day that affect housing, education, social care, planning, transport, culture, community safety, poverty and wellbeing. Those decisions affect both adults and children, often within the same family and community.
If children’s rights are treated as a separate agenda rather than part of a wider human rights framework, several problems can arise.
1. Children’s rights can become siloed
There is a risk that children’s rights are seen as something for education, children’s services or child protection teams only, rather than a responsibility across the whole council.
But children are affected by decisions made in every part of local government:
- transport affects their access to school and leisure
- housing affects their health and development
- planning affects play, safety and community connection
- cultural services affect participation and belonging
- anti-poverty work affects nearly every aspect of their lives
A rights-based approach only works if all services recognise their role.
2. Human rights can become adult-centred
If “human rights” is used as shorthand for the general adult population, and “children’s rights” is treated as a separate add-on, this reinforces an adult default. That weakens the overall rights culture and makes it easier for children’s experiences to be overlooked.
3. Services can miss the whole-family picture
Many local authority priorities, including tackling poverty and inequality, require a joined-up understanding of rights. Parents, carers and children all have rights, and these are often interconnected. Treating children’s rights and human rights as separate frameworks can make it harder to design services around people’s real lives.
4. Reporting and governance can become fragmented
Separate duties can sometimes lead to separate assessments, plans and reporting structures. While some tailored tools are necessary, too much fragmentation risks duplication and can obscure the bigger question: how well are we respecting, protecting and fulfilling rights across the system?
What is the better way to frame it?
The most helpful approach is not to collapse children’s rights into generic human rights language, but to treat them as an integral part of a wider human rights framework.
That means recognising two things at once:
- children’s rights are human rights
- children need specific and explicit attention because they are often more affected by decisions and less able to influence them
In practice, local government should avoid language that suggests two separate sets of rights, for example:
“We will ensure human rights and children’s rights are met."
A stronger phrasing would be:
“We will take a human rights-based approach that respects, protects and fulfils the rights of everyone, including children and young people.”
This keeps children visible without suggesting they sit outside the human rights framework.
What does this mean in practice?
For local government, this is about more than wording. It is about how leadership, policy and services are designed.
Leadership
Children’s rights should not sit only with education or children’s services. Corporate leaders across all services should understand children as rights-holders and recognise how their decisions affect children’s lives and outcomes.
Policy and planning
Rights should underpin core priorities such as tackling poverty, improving wellbeing, supporting education, community safety and participation. This means considering children’s rights from the outset, not retrospectively.
Participation
A human rights-based approach includes the right of children and young people to be heard in decisions that affect them. This means creating opportunities for meaningful participation and taking children’s views seriously in service design and improvement.
Data and accountability
Data can help local authorities understand where children’s rights may not be being realised equally, but measurement alone is not enough. Rights-based accountability also requires qualitative evidence, participation, and reflection on who is being left behind.
An important opportunity for Scotland
Scotland has an important opportunity to build a public sector culture grounded in human rights and attentive to how those rights are experienced by children. Local government has a central role in making that happen.
The challenge is not to choose between children’s rights and human rights. It is to avoid creating an artificial divide between them.
For councils, the key message is simple: children’s rights are human rights, and a strong human rights approach must work for children too.
If local authorities can hold onto that principle, they will be better placed to build services and systems that are fairer, more joined up, and more responsive to the people and communities they serve.
The Improvement Service is running a Human Rights Capability Building Project to actively support local authorities across Scotland to build their capabilities regarding human rights.
If you would like to get in touch about how your council is embedding human rights or to discuss this further, please get in touch with Felicia Szloboda, Human Rights Project Manager, at felicia.szloboda@improvementservice.org.uk.