Justice for Children, Justice for All: The Challenge to Achieve SDG 16+

• Advancing a new understanding of justice, not only aiming to overcome the challenges children face in accessing legal justice, but also promoting justice as an enabler of children’s opportunities and development to their full potential.
• Targeting critical decision makers, drawing together a range of leaders whose effort and focus ultimately can realise children’s human rights. In addition, we are also including – very importantly -those whose primary focus is not children, but whose decisions nevertheless have a crucial and significant impact on children’s lives, whether directly or indirectly. The crucial role of sustained and focussed political commitment, and the securing of the necessary investment in the appropriate financial resources and skills, underpin these efforts.
• Building on the growing momentum of national commitments. There are strong synergies in working coherently alongside the SDG 16 global platforms (Open Government Partnership; Global Partnership to End Violence against Children; Task Force for Justice Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Society) to support country-led commitments to deliver better outcomes for children, that will realise their rights, meet their needs and open up opportunities.
• Sharply prioritising impact on children’s outcomes, this Challenge Paper is maintaining a focus on the end results for children, achieved through highly effective implementation channels to securing sustained change, and addressing our weaknesses to date in accelerating progress to realise the rights, needs and opportunities for children.

The Challenge Paper, moreover, addresses four critical elements that we believe are fundamental to very substantively enhancing our progress, and to significantly accelerate the impact of all that we do:

• The Justice Gap for children: recognising the ways that justice, in all its forms and across its systems, must meet the needs and rights of children, and how the gaps in the securing and sustaining of justice should be addressed;
• Making the case: making the crucial case for investment in justice for children, both in terms of financial and human resources, and identifying the related benefits to the child and to the broader community and societies in which they live;
• Children’s contribution: meaningfully identifying how children’s empowerment, participation and engagement can be secured and facilitated in the design of approaches for the enhancement of all forms of justice;
• Call to Action: finally, powerfully articulating the imperative of securing the commitment and a concerted response from local, national, and international stakeholders – including political leaders, policy-makers, the deliverers of justice and other services and programmes – to implement and monitor solutions that realise Justice for Children.