On 17 December 2024, Sara Lembrechts (PhD candidate Ghent University – MigrLaw Migration Law Research Group) will give a lecture on 'Children’s views on achieving child-friendly justice in the asylum courtroom: an ethnographic and cocreative approach'.
When unaccompanied minors or families with minor children obtain a negative decision on their asylum application in Belgium, they can appeal at the Council for Alien Law Litigation (CALL). Even though an appeal at the CALL is first and foremost a written procedure, several hundreds of children and young people visit the CALL premises in Brussels yearly for an oral hearing with a judge. Some merely join their parents or guardian, while others are also heard in person. This (lack of) interaction between asylum-judges and young people brings about significant challenges and opportunities, in particular as to balancing children’s rights to protection (from harm), provision (of child-friendly services) and participation (being heard).
Children’s rights instruments, including the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Council of Europe Guidelines on Child Friendly Justice, offer a valuable framework for analysis. They shed light on how to overcome challenges and strengthen opportunities in the spatial and communicative interactions between adults and children inside an asylum courtroom. However, little is known about what children and young people themselves understand to include a child-friendly approach.
This presentation is an illustration of how research can include children’s own perspectives on their lived experiences of an asylum appeal. The combination of ethnographic observations at the CALL, in-depth conversations with children and young people and action-research with children and judges, provides a unique foundation for the development of new pathways towards age-sensitive justice in appellate asylum cases involving minors. In particular, involving children in developing these solutions highlights that children seeking international protection are vulnerable and agentic at the same time, and that both aspects should be attended to.
