DOUGHTY STREET CHAMBERS CHILDREN’S RIGHTS GROUP ANNUAL CHILDREN’S RIGHTS LECTURE 2024

Описание: Every year, in November, the international community celebrates World Children’s Day. It is a key opportunity to promote awareness of children’s rights and what is needed to achieve them.

The Children’s Rights Group at Doughty Street Chambers is delighted that this year’s Children’s Rights Lecture was delivered by Professor Sonia Livingstone, who spoke on ‘Children’s Rights Apply Online as Offline – or Do They? Emerging Challenges in Implementing Children’s Rights in the Digital Environment’. Sonia was joined by Nicole Stoilova who shared a youth perspective on the issues raised in the lecture.

The expectation that children’s rights apply online as offline has been reinforced by recent developments in law and policy. But ensuring this is reflected in practice is proving challenging in multiple ways. Society is struggling with the sheer scale of the problems children face that appear linked to the digital environment, as well as the seeming unaccountability of global tech companies. Finding the ‘solutions’ to these problems, however, will change the internet as we know it, for better and for worse. Drawing on examples of efforts to regulate and redesign children’s digital learning, safety and play, this lecture examines some of the ways in which children’s rights are beginning to be applied online – and the barriers that remain.

Sonia Livingstone DPhil (Oxon), OBE, FBA, FBPS, FAcSS, FRSA, is a professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has published 21 books on media audiences, children and young people’s risks and opportunities, media literacy and rights in the digital environment, including “Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children’s lives” (OUP 2020). Since founding the EC-funded 33 country “EU Kids Online” research network, and Global Kids Online (with UNICEF Office of Research-Innocenti), she has advised the Council of Europe, European Commission, European Parliament, UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, OECD, ITU and UNICEF. She is currently leading the Digital Futures for Children centre at LSE with the 5Rights Foundation.

The event was chaired by Professor Aoife Nolan, co-lead of the Children’s Rights Group at Doughty Street Chambers.

The lecture was followed by an expert panel discussion, including:

Associate Kay Firth-Butterfield, Doughty Street Chambers
Leo Ratledge, Co-Director of the Child Rights International Network (CRIN)
Jen Persson, founder of the not-for-profit organisation, Defend Digital Me
Tracey Gyateng is the co-founder of Data, Tech and Black Communities (DTBC)