On Friday 12 March 2021, the (Dutch) website www.codevoorkinderrechten.nl was launched. This code for children’s rights has been created to help those involved in the development and design of digital services to develop these services with the interests of children in mind.

In collaboration with the De Waag Technology & Society, Simone van der Hof of the Centre for Law and Digital Technology (eLaw department) will develop a code for digital children's rights based on the example of the age appropriate design code in Great Britain.

Monique Tekstra-van Lochem decided to develop a book of her own that all children can recognize themselves in. In May

What do you get when you combine traditional storytelling, new technology, and a whole lot of creative passion? Sumak Kichwa Wawa, an Andean children's storybook using augmented reality, that's what! Assistant professor, Martine Bruil and researcher Ximena Buller Machado tell us more about this special…

Winners of Children's Rights Moot Court 2023

Professor Ann Skelton, Rotating Honorary Chair of Enforcement of Children's Rights 2020/2021 at the Department of Child Law, has been re-elected as member of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child.

What dose of medicine do you give a child? That depends to a large extent on how quickly their kidneys remove the drug from the blood. For ethical reasons it is impossible to measure this directly in little patients. PhD candidate Sinziana Cristea combined different types of modelling and lots of data…

Moot Court

The Jaap Doek Children’s Rights Thesis Award is an annual award for the best thesis in the field of Children’s Rights granted by Defence for Children and the Department of Child Law of Leiden Law School.

The Jaap Doek Children’s Rights Thesis Award is an annual award for the best thesis in the field of Children’s Rights granted by Defence for Children and the Department of Child Law of Leiden Law School.

On 8 October, the Independent Expert, Prof. Manfred Nowak, leading the UN Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty presented his report to the UN General Assembly. The presentation of the final report is set for 19 November 2019, at the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the UN Convention on the…

From 26 until 28 January Leiden Law School hosted the regional training for lawyers as part of the EU funded project Advancing the Defence Rights of Children, organized by Fair Trials.

The Department of Child Law and the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies of Leiden University are now accepting applications for the Frontiers of Children’s Rights in the Caribbean Region Spring School.

On the 6th of December, Céril van Leeuwen has won the Jaap Doek Children’s rights thesis award for her thesis ‘The right to be heard restricted: is this desirable in the civil law proceedings?’ This award, for the best master thesis in the area of Children’s Rights, is annually granted by Defence for…

On 24-25 October 2017, the Council of Europe organized an international conference to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (Oviedo Convention).

On 27 January 2020, Dr Yannick van den Brink, Assistant Professor at the Department of Child Law, participated in a live webinar titled ‘Pre-Trial Detention of Children in India’.

Prof. Ton Liefaard connected to around 150 legal professionals in India and beyond to reflect upon the COVID-response of governments from a children’s rights perspective.

The amici curiae brief was filed with the United States District Court for the Central District of California, on 28 January 2020.

On 12 December 2019, Dr Yannick van den Brink, assistant professor at the Department of Child Law and Rubicon Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, gave a keynote speech at the conference ‘Strengthening Juvenile Justice Systems in Europe’, which was organised in Valencia, Spain.

In the presence of their families and friends, the thesis supervisors personally addressed each of the students and presented them with their well-deserved master diploma in the Academy Building’s Klein Auditorium.

On Monday 23 August 2021 the graduation ceremony took place in the Leiden University Academy Building’s Groot Auditorium. Graduates and staff abroad participated online via the Livestream and Zoom.

In the last five years the Dutch children’s ombudsman has developed into a full-fledged supervisory body monitoring compliance with children’s rights in the Netherlands. A fuller engagement with its statutory tasks, greater involvement of children and strengthening the autonomous position of the children’s…

We are proud of Chelsea Schuin, Xin Jiang, Siksanee Phollarpthawee and Lucy Opoka for their outstanding research and writing performance in the Children’s Rights Moot Court .

In early January, Joanne van der Leun (Dean of the Leiden Law School), Ton Liefaard (Program Director of the Advanced Studies in International Children’s Rights, LL.M), and Anette van Sandwijk (Head Bureau International Education) visited China.

The ‘Leer te Durven!’ program (Learn to Dare) is a preventive training program for children with mild anxiety symptoms (Simon & Bögels, 2014). The program has been developed for children between the ages of 8 and 12 who feel or behave anxiously, avoid situations, are afraid of doing things wrong, appear…

A delegation of the Child Law Department has attended the World congress on family law and children’s rights in Dublin, from 4-7 June. This congress organised once in every four years was hosted by prof. Ursula Kilkelly (University College Cork). Over 600 people attended the congress; professionals…

In a podcast of the Netherlands Internet Governance Forum (NL GF) and the Safer Internet Centre Nederland, Simone van der Hof, Professor of Law and Digital Technologies at Leiden University and Thijs Hannema, a lawyer at Kennedy van der Laan, discuss online privacy of children.

At the start of 2020, the book ‘Safeguarding Children’s Rights in Immigration Law’ was published by Intersentia.

In this thesis, dynamic testing principles were applied to examine young children's potential for learning. Our studies focused on the role of cognitive flexibility, to further increase our understanding of the cognitive processes involved in children's ability to learn from instruction and feedback,…

How do children learn to see the world through someone else’s perspective? Max van Duijn, assistant professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), receives 24,167 euros from the Elise Mathilde Foundation and the Leiden University Fund (LUF). With this grant he will set up a…

Leiden University addresses the UN on children’s rights

48 student teams from all over the world will be taking part in the international online moot court competition. The event is organised by Leiden University in partnership with Baker McKenzie.

On Tuesday 23 August 2022 the graduation ceremony took place in Leiden University’s Academy Building. Graduates and their guests greatly enjoyed the festive ceremony.

Prof. Ton Liefaard and Chrisje Sandelowsky-Bosman visited Curaçao to launch de Caribbean Center for Children’s Rights and present research.

Max van Duijn, Assistant Professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), has been awarded a Veni grant for his research into children's empathy. The ability to empathise can be studied by telling stories. This process, known as 'Theory of Mind' or ‘mindreading’, can provide important…

On Wednesday, 30 August 2023, the graduation ceremony took place in Leiden University’s Academy Building. The ceremony was a momentous occasion, attended by distinguished guests, faculty members, and the proud families and friends of the graduates. The event celebrated the hard work, dedication, and…

Researcher Max van Duijn and PhD student Bram van Dijk apply language models to stories told by children to investigate empathy. For this research, they received the Best Paper Award at the Computational Natural Language Learning Conference in Singapore.

On 8-9 December 2016 the Department of Children’s Rights of Leiden Law School held an international PhD conference on Children’s Rights in Leiden, under the direction of Ton Liefaard, Julia Sloth-Nielsen and Marielle Bruning. As one of the institutional partners of this department in the research program…

The case note examines the recent inquiry report published by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

Organised in collaboration with the Bosnia and Herzegovina State Ministry of Justice, UNICEF’s Europe and Central Asia Regional Office and UNICEF’s Bosnia and Herzegovina Country Office, the conference took place from 25-27 February 2020, in Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina).

A significant percentage of children who have spent a period in youth care institutions or foster homes since 1945 received inadequate protection from physical, psychological and sexual violence. Interventions by supervisory authorities in cases involving violence were inadequate.

On 6 September 2019, the Governor of Murang'a County, Mwangi wa Iria, signed a declaration at Leiden University to protect the rights of children.

On November 17, 2017, Professor Simone van der Hof gave a duo lecture with her colleague Professor Eva Lievens from Ghent University during the 'Children and Digital Rights' conference at the Information Law and Policy Centre, which is part of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (University of L…

Stephanie Rap and Chrisje Sandelowsky-Bosman have contributed as authors to the online training manual for lawyers, that is developed as part of the training programme Advancing the Defence Rights of Children.

Dutch children’s picture books are full of animals, but mainly mammals are portrayed. Especially pets and exotic animals are popular. A large part of the Dutch fauna is less visible, but biologist Michiel Hooykaas of Leiden University sees plenty of opportunities for a more biodiverse book world.

Children’s clothes are full of cute, fun and cool animals. Researcher Michiel Hooykaas investigated which animals were most prevalent, to see how cultural product can influence the knowledge of biodiversity.

Traditional school tests, like the Dutch CITO, largely reflect students' existing knowledge and abilities. However, dynamic testing sheds light on students' learning potential, discovered Mirjam de Vreeze in her PhD research. This approach is especially promising for children with learning challenges,…

Wars, climate change and the effects of covid have caused a global decline in children’s well-being. In her inaugural lecture Ann Skelton, Professor of Children’s Rights in a Sustainable World, points to the disastrous effects of multiple interacting crises.

Children in the Netherlands develop prejudices based on ethnicity at an early age. Ymke de Bruijn (27) came to this conclusion in her dissertation ‘Child Interethnic Prejudice in the Netherlands: Social Learning from Parents and Picture Books’. For her PhD project she took a closer look at the behaviours…

As a prelude to the Night of Discoveries, an Afternoon of Discoveries will be held in Leiden on 21 September for children from the age of eight. Researchers will tell exciting tales and the children will get to do experiments.