Workshop Invitation: international workshop focusing on best individual assessment practices

We invite you to the upcoming international workshop focusing on best individual assessment practices

Each year more than one million minors in the European Union face criminal proceedings within and across national borders. While in recent decades juvenile justice issues have increasingly been on the agendas of international institutions and organizations – still, thirty years after the introduction of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, safeguarding children’s rights in daily practice remains a challenge. Moreover, consistent practice of individual assessment, as ruled by the EU Directive 2016/800, has been noticeably absent.

The EU co-funded project “Procedural safeguards of accused or suspected children: improving the implementation of the right to individual assessment” (IA-CHILD) team aims to bring more clarity to matters of individual assessment to the professional community by organising an international online seminar: “Individual assessment of children in criminal proceedings: in search for best practices”. The team, consisting of partners from Lithuania (Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences), Croatia (the Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences of the University of Zagreb), Greece (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) and Cyprus (HFC Hope for Children Policy Center), kindly invite individual assessment practitioners, national and international policy makers, researchers, academics and others to participate in the interactive workshop on 3 May 2021, 10:00–15:55 CEST.

The event will focus on good practices of individual assessment in the Netherlands, as well as topics related to the cooperation of experts doing and using the individual assessment of suspected or accused children in criminal procedures. The event will include expert presentations regarding national experiences and initiatives implementing individual assessment. The presentations will be followed by interactive coffee breaks and a final discussion.

The seminar will feature such prominent speakers as: Dr Stephanie Rap of Leiden University Law School; June De Groot of Defence for Children International, the Netherlands; and Gabriella Gallizia of Defence for Children International, Italia.

The workshop will be held remotely through the Child Protection Hub for South East Europe. Certificates of attendance will be issued upon request of participants who attended the full event program.

Full event agenda and registration can be found here: LINK

It should be noted that the workshop, taking place on the 3 May 2021, is a practical event, whereas the upcoming final conference for the IA-CHILD project, to be held remotely on 30 June, will bring together the community of researchers and practitioners to discuss the main topics of individual assessment. The results of the project and the Handbook on individual assessment will be presented. Be sure to keep up with the news on upcoming events through Child Hub (https://childhub.org/en) or the IA-CHILD project Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/IAChildEU/).