A home educating parent has launched a petition on Change.org following a disappointing response from the Children’s Commissioner to her children’s pleas for support in upholding their Article 16 rights under the UNCRC.
Investigate GIRFEC breaches of UNCRC Article 16, interference in private and family life
We value ALL children’s rights and request that the Children’s Commissioner protect ALL these rights under UNCRC and not be selective of which rights are protected and upheld. CYPCS office have refused to uphold and protect Children’s Right Article 16.
We have experienced, like many parents, unlawful Local Authority investigation of our family, home, lifestyle, parenting, based on malicious and unevidenced wellbeing opinion rather than welfare, breaching children’s right to private family life.
All this unlawful data processing resulted in a breach to our Article 8 rights, and our children’s Article 16 rights. Our family was scrutinised for months and we were investigated by Social Work, who completely exonerated us and went further to say that there were no concerns – the complete opposite in fact.
SPSO have upheld my complaints and ruled that there were no grounds for referral to SCRA.
The CYPCS has been at pains to swerve any action on behalf of these children and young people, whose Article 16 rights are clearly considered fair game. Buck passing has become a national sport as GIRFEC gang culture has infected so-called rights watchdogs as well as ‘services’.
As the petitioner points out:
Although GIRFEC wellbeing data processing under GDPR breaches rights to privacy and family life, and in some cases attacks on children’s reputations, CYPCS have intimated this to be an ICO and SPSO overlap.
A data processing investigation would be limited to information rights breaches as confirmed by ICO, while SPSO state they only investigate maladministration and procedure.
Both have written that they are limited in their scope for investigation and do not consider nor investigate breaches to Human Rights. It is the Human Rights aspect that we focus on in our request for an investigation into the systematic breaching of Article 16, and not the Information Rights or maladministration aspect.
And here we have it. UNCRC rights are conditional on a strategic plan that has created a hierarchy of rights and rights-holders and some simply do not count.
