Without access to justice and to an effective remedy children with disabilities are often forgotten about, institutionalised and ill-treated.
In the case of V.I. v. The Republic of Moldova, Validity convincingly argued before the European Court of Human Rights that the denial of access to justice for children with disabilities is rarely an individual violation but a result of systemic failure, for example a failure of the State to provide children with disabilities with proper and effective community-based services. In the V.I. case, the Strasbourg Court called on the State to reform the system of involuntary placement in psychiatric hospitals and of involuntary psychiatric treatment of children with disabilities to respond to these human rights violations. These reforms should mean the abolishment of involuntary psychiatric interventions on the basis of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) to which Moldova is a State Party.
Following the release of the judgment V.I. shared:
“I had lost hope that justice could be done for me. I am happy to see that after all these years my story has finally been told. My hope is that no child will ever have to go through what I had to. I now look forward to a brighter future, leaving the dark times behind.”
Similarly, Validity found systemic failings in law, policy, and lack of effective and independent monitoring in the Hungarian Topház institution in 2017, where 220 children and adults with disabilities were kept by denying their fundamental human rights, including their rights to access to justice and to an effective remedy. They were put in cage beds, given physical and chemical restraints, and left unattended. Validity attempted multiple times to gain access to the institution and authorisation to meet with and interact with residents to provide support and legal assistance. However, we were denied access even to those children who had previously given Validity a power of attorney. In this case, recently, the Hungarian Supreme Court explicitly ruled against the CRPD and the jurisprudence of the CRPD Committee.
Validity’s work in the case of Perez Mwase v Attorney General & Another in Uganda, underscores how systemic denial of children with autism and intellectual disabilities in Uganda from necessary support and services, including early detection of autism and intellectual disabilities, lead to neglect, abuse, exploitation and exclusion by the communities, which further result in the denial of their rights to equality, inclusive education, freedom from violence and even access to justice. In this landmark judgment, the High Court of Uganda at Jinja found that the failure by the State to provide rehabilitation and habilitation services to the child amounted to a violation of the right to equality and non-discrimination in breach of the State’s obligations under international human rights.
At the time, Derrick Kizza, the Executive Director of Mental Health Uganda in welcoming the judgment stated:
“The greatest disability relates to the inability to recognise the barriers to inclusion for people with disabilities. The precedent set in the judgment provides signs that the judiciary is starting to understand and appreciate the unique needs of people with intellectual disabilities and their struggles in access to justice in Uganda. It is a huge milestone in the fight against stigma that they, together with their families, have to endure on a daily across all spheres of life.”
We have documented similar challenges all around Europe in our EU co-founded projects.
Under the DIS-CONNECTED project, which focused on women and children with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities who have become victims of violence in facilities and programmes designed to serve them, our findings revealed that there are distinct barriers children with disabilities encounter in access to justice, including:
- normalisation of violence in institutions (human rights abuses are accepted as an unavoidable aspect of institutional culture, which increases tolerance for these occurrences);
- dependency on the perpetrator (children with disabilities depend on their carers more than anybody else, and they are under the power of those violating their rights);
- lack of information in accessible and alternative formats (children with disabilities are not provided with meaningful information about their rights, including their right to access to justice and to effective remedies in accessible formats);
- lack of independent access to lawyers and independent monitoring (restricting human rights organisations’ and lawyers’ access to children with disabilities in institutions, and denying the right of children to seek legal representation, are well-established practices);
- intersecting injustices and inequalities (children with disabilities encounter complex forms of inaccessible justice leading to the denial of effective remedies).
Under the Enabling inclusion and access to justice for defendants with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities (ENABLE) project, which promoted access to justice and fairer criminal proceedings for defendants with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities in 8 EU countries, we identified the need for ensuring age, gender and disability-specific procedural accommodations and created a Model Bench Book to help justice actors achieve these.
Under the LINK project, which focuses on the persistent barriers children, particularly children with disabilities face in accessing justice as victims or witnesses of crime, we identified ways of how modern technologies and scientific achievements, including assistive technologies for augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), can improve the functioning of the justice and the child protection systems and their efficient cooperation. We have also developed a Model Multidisciplinary Cooperation System to support cooperation amongst stakeholders within the criminal justice system and conduct individual assessments of the support needs of children with disabilities within judicial systems.
In our Access to Justice for Children with Mental Disabilities project, our findings included bias in relation to disability as a decisive barrier for children with disabilities in exercising their right to access to justice. These biases often flow from a protectionist and/or paternalistic model of disability.
Drawing upon Validity’s extensive experience working with and for children with disabilities globally in many aspects of life, including access to justice and to effective remedies, we have assisted the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (Committee) in developing its upcoming General Comment No. 27 on children’s right to access to justice and to an effective remedy. First, in August 2024, we sent a joint submission to the Committee on the concept of the general comment to clarify terms and highlight key topics concerning children with disabilities, and then, at the end of June 2025, Validity sent input to the Committee concerning the advanced version of the draft general comment. Furthermore, we contributed to the development of the general comment through joint submissions of the Child-Friendly Justice European Network to which Validity is a member.