Shelter Scotland provide housing advice and information, including advice specifically for young people.
The LGBT Youth Scotland website has advice, information and resources for young people, parents and carers and professionals. There’s a chat line, too (tel. 0131 555 3940).
WhoCares? Scotland helps ensure looked after and care experienced children and young people’s voices are heard, offering advocacy support across most local authority areas.
You can find information and advice about personal information and data protection from the Information Commissioner’s Office (Scotland).
The Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland gives advice about rights in relation to mental health care and treatment.
NHS Choices – Young People and Mental Health offers advice and information about a variety of mental health problems, as well as links to useful resources.
Breathing Space is a helpline staffed by trained advisors. They will listen and provide support and advice (tel. 0800 83 85 87).
If you believe you may have been discriminated against the Equality Advisory Support Service provides advice and assistance on equality and human rights legislation and how it may relate to you.
You can find information and get advice about all aspects of additional support for learning from Enquire, who are the independent advice service for additional support for learning in Scotland.
Resolve: ASL is an independent mediation service which assists in resolving disputes about decisions regarding additional support for learning.
Govan Law Education Law Unit run a helpline giving information about education law in Scotland. They also provide representation in some education law legal cases.
You can find information about how to complain about public services on the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman’s website.
If your complaint is about the NHS, NHS inform has a factsheet for children and young people about how to make complaints about NHS services.
The Patient Advice and Support Service offers information about NHS complaints procedures, independent advice and advocacy support.
Complaints about independent healthcare services (not NHS services) should be made to Healthcare Improvement Scotland.
Young people between the ages of 11 and 25 can get free, confidential advice on legal issues, 24 hours a day, from the Young Scot Law Line (tel. 0808 801 0801).
The Scottish Child Law Centre provides free legal advice, guidance and information about the law for and about children and young people.
Clan Childlaw provides free legal advice and representation for children and young people.
The Ethnic Minorities Law Centre provides legal advice and representation to individuals from Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities in Scotland.
You can find information about free, independent advocacy services in your area from the Scottish Independent Advocacy Alliance.
Special category data is particularly sensitive personal information. Because it’s more open to misuse than other personal information, there are extra protections around it.
It includes information about someone’s:
Your personal information is any information that can be identified as being about you.
For example, imagine we sent out a form that asked you to tell us your name, which school you went to and your opinion about something.
There probably isn’t anyone else at your school who has the same name as you, so we’d be able to work out that you personally had given us that opinion.
That would make your name and the school you went to personal information, because we could use it to identify you. It also means the opinion you put down on the form is your personal information.
Some personal information is called special category data, which has extra protections because it’s more sensitive than other personal information.
Special category data is particularly sensitive personal information. Because it’s more open to misuse than other personal information, there are extra protections around it.
It includes information about someone’s:
More in the Rights questions and answers section
Sometimes we will need special category data to help us resolve issues that affect the rights of individual or groups of children and young people in Scotland.
We also ask people to share some of this information with us to help us meet our equalities duties.
What governments should do to respect human rights are set out in the General Measures of Implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). These say that:
In their General Comment 2, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child explains how people like Children and Young People’s Commissioners can best protect children’s human rights:
The Committee also says that like other national human rights institutions, Commissioners should be independent of government.
You can complain about the Commissioner or their staff by following our complaints policy.
All children have rights, and that includes babies and very young children.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) expresses these rights within the framework of children’s lives and experiences. The rights in the UNCRC are linked together and support each other – so supporting one right, like the right to participate in play, promotes other rights including the right to be heard, to free expression, to development and to education.
Long before young children can understand the concept of children’s rights, they can develop a sense of their own agency. Babies and very young children can develop this through relationships with parents and carers, and through their surroundings and environment. Their experience of these early relationships will influence their sense of self, how they view others and how they respond to their environment.
Babies and very young children need to be supported by the adults that care for them to make their own decisions and to be listened to. They need to feel that their ideas, thoughts and decisions are respected.
They are finding out about their rights through how others treat them. They are learning about expressing themselves, their interdependence with others, how valued they are. They are also learning about sharing, making choices and their place in the world.
Early childhood is a critical period for the realisation of rights and good early years experiences increase the chances of children being able to realise their rights through childhood.
The Court of Session is the highest civil court in Scotland.
When a judge makes a decision in a civil court it can be appealed in a civil court that has more authority, who can decide the judge’s decision was wrong. But then their decision can also be appealed in a civil court with more authority than that.
The highest civil court is the one with the most authority of all. Once they make a decision, it can only be appealed to the UK Supreme Court, and only in some circumstances.
There are times when a case in a court of law can impact more than just the people directly involved in it. The court’s decision may affect other children and young people’s rights by establishing an important point of law or principle. That means that other cases might use this point of law or principle in the future.
When a case like this comes up, the Commissioner may ask the court’s permission to intervene— become involved. When they do this, the Commissioner doesn’t take sides or represent children directly. Instead, they bring issues about children’s rights to the court’s attention to help the judge make a good decision. Doing this is a way of doing strategic litigation.
When we say children and young people should enjoy their rights, that doesn’t just mean they should take pleasure from them. In this context someone enjoys their rights when they fully possess and benefit from them— so they’re actually put into practice in their lives.