Children’s Rights in Europe

Advancing children’s rights is an important contribution towards supporting the resilience of societies, by assuring that law works for all, especially the most vulnerable and marginalized. PILnet’s child rights pro bono program aims to protect the rights of children across Europe by helping those organizations working for children find high-quality free legal assistance for programmatic and operational issues. These efforts include:

  • Building the capacity of European lawyers,
  • Creating a community of lawyers and advocates to exchange best practices,
  • Raising awareness of decision makers of this issue, and
  • Encouraging partnerships between these lawyers and child-focused NGOs.

Get Engaged

PILnet is inviting lawyers from law firms, bar associations, CSOs, and others to join a network of professionals dedicated to providing free legal assistance to organizations supporting children’s rights. We will create spaces for these professionals to collaborate and broker partnerships between them to serve the needs of these children and the organizations that support them in targeted European countries.

PILnet also offers resources on child rights, child psychology, procedural safeguards for children, child safeguarding, and child-friendly communication, found below.

If you are a lawyer and you want to get involved, let us know.

If you are an CSO working in children rights, tell us more about your organization’s needs.

As one part of PILnet’s work, Terre de Hommes, PILnet and their partners, supported by the EU, launched “CLEAR-Rights: Enhancing legal assistance and access to justice for children in conflict with the law in Europe.” Inspired by the sessions on access to justice for children at PILnet’s 2019 Forum, this collaborative is developing innovative guidelines and tools for legal professionals to advance justice for children involved with criminal proceedings. 

The project, which includes experts from a variety of disciplines and children themselves, addresses current gaps and challenges of the European legal aid system to secure children’s equal access to free and specialized quality legal assistance to ensure a justice process that is fair and centered on the needs of the child.

2022 PILnet Global Forum: Child Justice: Best practices for pro bono lawyering

CLEAR-Rights Resources

Our Partners

The “CLEAR-Rights: Enhancing legal assistance and access to justice for children in conflict with the law in Europe” project is implemented under the lead of Terre des hommes Regional Office in Hungary in partnership with PILnet (Hungary), Alliance of Lawyers for Human Rights (France), Terre des hommes (Romania), Defencefor Children (The Netherlands), and Defence for Children International (Belgium).

CLEAR-Rights is co-funded by the Justice Programme of the European Union (2014-2020)