Parliamentary Committee says residence test will lead to the UK breaching the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child
Parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights has concluded in a report released today that the Government's proposed legal aid residence test will lead to the UK breaching the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) as it will prevent children from being effectively represented in legal proceedings which affect them.
You can read the Committee's report Legal aid: children and the residence test here.
In the report, the Committee concludes that if the residence test applies to children, it cannot see any way to ensure that the views of children are heard in any judicial or administrative proceedings affecting the child, as required by Article 12 of the UNCRC, or to ensure that the child's best interests are a primary consideration in such proceedings, as required by Article 3.
The Committee's report set out in some detail the potential impact of the residence test on four particular categories of children, including unaccompanied children and undocumented children.
In a press release, Dr Hywel Francis MP, the Chair of the Committee, said: "We welcome the positive changes to the legal aid proposals the Government has made in response to our first Report on this subject – particularly to exempt refugees from the residence test. However, as long as children have a legal right to take part in proceedings which affect their interests, it is wrong – indeed unlawful – to make it more difficult for a particular group of children to exercise that right. We do not feel that the Government has supplied enough evidence to justify why children should not be excluded altogether from the residence test, and we feel that it has not given enough thought to some of the practical obstacles which children will face. Given the critical conclusions reached by two other parliamentary committees about this instrument, I think the Government should withdraw it immediately."