The report focuses on the role of children’s rights in addressing child poverty in the Council of Europe. Showing how the European Social Charter can serve as a framework or roadmap for state efforts to combat child poverty. Both, the 1961 European Social Charter and the Revised Charter of 1996 set out a wide range of rights with implications for state efforts to combat child poverty. These include Article 30 on the right to protection from poverty and social exclusion.
There is growing concern about child poverty levels in Europe, as well as the implications of these for children’s lived experiences, broader societal wellbeing, and economic development. There is simultaneously ever wider political, practitioner and advocate recognition that child poverty causes, results from, and constitutes a failure to secure children’s rights – and that child rights have a crucial potential role to play in shaping state responses to child poverty in Europe. This is true of children’s social, economic, political, cultural and civil rights, all of which are threatened by a life lived in poverty. Responding to these facts, this report centres on the role of child rights in addressing child poverty in the Council of Europe (COE).