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Yes, children and young people do enjoy special protection under international law. Of particular importance is the 'Convention on the Rights of the Child', the most widely ratified international human rights treaty. It brings together civil, political, economic, social, cultural rights and humanitarian law into one legally binding document. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights also specifically refers to children, noting that childhood is a time that deserves special care and protection assistance. So, the international legal framework provides special protection for children and, generally, that is reflected in domestic frameworks as well. 

Children's ability to communicate, complain, and understand is different to that of adults. So when children are in situations of detention, they are particularly vulnerable to the power dynamics at play, and it is especially important that additional protections are put in place. Children's Commissions such as mine can play an important role in safeguarding children and young people. The creation of such bodies is in line with the Paris Principles [a set of international standards guiding the work of National Human Rights Institutions] and the Second General Comment of the Committee on the Rights of the Child [on the role of National Human Rights Institution]. It is also important that national preventive mechanisms focus not just on formal detention of children through the justice system but also on informal detention - any residential or educational setting where children are particularly vulnerable and situations where they have complex communication needs.

Since its establishment in 2009, what has the UK National Preventative Mechanism (NPM) achieved? Where has it made most progress and what challenges does it face?

I think the UK NPM is very interesting. The approach of designating a large number of existing bodies, mainly inspectorates, to form the NPM - instead of creating some sort of new body - was something I was quite sceptical about at the time. I think that when the NPM was originally created it was very much business-as-usual, with each of these bodies doing their day-to-day inspection job. There was not really a sense of it being a human rights organisation with a preventative mandate. However, over the past nine years we have seen incredible transformative change in relation to the NPM, which is now very effective in developing policies and standards. It is also really interesting that many of the bodies that are members of the NPM, which did not traditionally see themselves as human rights bodies and did not bring a human rights based approach to inspections, have now started using human rights language. We see this reflected, for example, in changing standards for the prison inspections in different parts of the UK. 

This move towards a human rights based approach to inspection as well as a growing understanding of the role of prevention, has delivered a really powerful change in the systems that oversee detention. It has also led, in my view, to a cultural change within places of detention (reflected, for example, in changes within the prison estate in Scotland). So we can observe that inspection standards actually deliver cultural change because of the work of the NPM and the inspectorates.

You do have personal experience inspecting places of detention - can you tell us a bit more about what these inspections entail?

In my former role at the Scottish Human Rights Commission we worked in close partnership with Her Majesty's Inspectorates for Prisons in Scotland. I was involved in inspecting all of the prisons in Scotland as part of a multidisciplinary team, along with colleagues with healthcare education backgrounds, traditional prison inspectors, and others. We would spent a week at a time in the prison, speaking to detainees and staff and assessing the implementation of human rights standards. I think having a human rights expert as part of that team really added quite a lot of value while for me it was useful to learn some of the inspection skills. It was quite powerful to speak directly to detained persons, learn about their experience and get their views, and, in my view, the prison facilities and the prison management were quite responsive. 

As part of my international expert work for the Council of Europe, the European Union and other international bodies, I have also been involved in prison and police cell inspections in the Balkans, Ukraine, Turkey and some other places. I think that there is quite a contrast between the ways in which international and domestic inspection teams work. When you are working as an international inspector you bring in a lot of expertise of international standards and knowledge about what is happening in other countries, whereas some of the domestic work is much more focused and more regular. So, I believe it is really important to have a combination of international oversight and domestic monitoring, as established under the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT). 

This interview was conducted by Alex Lee, MSc Global Governance and Ethics. It was recorded at the inaugural meeting of the UK Network on the Prohibition of Torture on 2 November 2017.