Child Rights Strategic Litigation: Key Principles for Climate Justice Litigation

Abstract

Child rights strategic litigation (CRSL) is litigation that seeks to bring about positive legal and/ or social change in terms of children’s enjoyment of their rights. Recent years have seen a huge increase in CRSL related to climate justice being brought at the national, regional and international levels. These Key Principles for climate justice litigators working on CRSL emerge from the Advancing Child Rights Strategic Litigation (ACRiSL) Project. This is a three-year global research collaboration bringing together partners from advocacy and academia to work on child rights strategic litigation. The Key Principles draw on interviews and engagements with climate justice litigators across four continents, as well as a number of public ACRiSL Network events at which children and young people with lived experience of CRSL, litigators, and other CRSL actors working in the climate justice sphere shared their experiences. The Key Principles seek to show how child rights are being, and can be, integrated into climate justice strategic litigation practice. The Key Principles focus on four key stages of child right strategic litigation decision-making: the scoping, planning and design of litigation; the operationalisation of litigation, follow-up to litigation, including implementation and dissemination, and extra-legal advocacy (political advocacy and other campaigning, media work and communications).