WHAT ARE CHILD-FRIENDLY PROCESSES?
March 2025

CF recently met with the The Child Welfare Tribunal, judges of Norwegian Courts and the Municipality of Bergen in a workshop. The Centre for Discretion and Paternalism (DIPA) at UiB owns the project and this time the theme was CHILD-FRIENDLY PROCESSES.

How can decisions by the child protection system, the Child Welfare and Health Board and the courts work in a child-friendly way? What does it mean that something is child-friendly? What knowledge has to be the basis in order to call something child-friendly?

The Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) take precedence when other Norwegian legislation (special laws) conflicts with the UNCRC. What significance should the UNCRC and the general comments related to the Convention have in discussions about child-friendliness.

The Supreme Court of Norway has said that general comments should be given great weight where it says “shall”. The general comments describe what child-friendliness means. Should this then be given great weight? Such discussions must take place in the PARTICIPATION project, but also in other development work and projects that concern children in vulnerable life situations.

PARTICIPATION is a very 🤩exciting🤩 collaborative project between researchers at the University of Bergen, the DIPA Center, and four key partners to ensure good child protection services: 1)The Child Welfare Tribunal, 2) The Norwegian courts and their administration, 3) Bergen Municipality and 4) Changefactory (children and young people).

The following week, members of the Child Welfare Tribunal went to Belgium and the Netherlands to learn more about child-friendly processes. CF participated, to contribute with questions, from the perspective of children. The group visited courts and universities, and the topic was how the rooms and the conduct of conversations with children must be, to be called child-friendly. An important topic was also methods for including children in this work.

Link to the project: https://discretion.uib.no/childrens-right-to-participation/