Back in June 2021, the European Union adopted the principle of a European Child Guarantee. The purpose is to provide guidance and funding for national governments to ensure all children at risk of poverty or social exclusion have access to essential services: free education, free health care, free school meals as well as adequate housing. The programme focuses on children at an early age because disadvantage at a young age impacts children’s ability to succeed later in life.
The programme is important to COPE and its members. Indeed, the EU’s 27 Member States have been tasked to establish “child guarantee action plans”. Those action plans are due to be presented to the European Commission by the end of March 2022.
It is likely that your government is already working on such a plan. Now is the time to reach out to your government and ensure that the specific needs of children with an imprisoned parent are taken into account.
There is no specific provision for children impacted by parental imprisonment in the EU Child Guarantee. However, the plan focuses on five broader categories of children where most children with a parent in prison fit in:
- Homeless children
- Children with disabilities or mental health issues
- Children with a migrant background or a minority ethnic origin (Roma in particular)
- Children in alternative care, and institutional care in particular
- Children in precarious family situations
It is worth noting that the European Child Guarantee is designed to complement a related EU initiative, the EU Child Rights Strategy. Adopted by the European Commission in March 2021, the Strategy, inter alia, calls on EU Member States to implement the 2018 Council of Europe Recommendation on Children with an imprisoned parent. You can point this out to your government to add leverage to your advocacy. The Strategy is currently being debated in the EU Council of Ministers and expected to be adopted by the end of this year. Both initiatives have been informed by extensive consultations with citizens, stakeholders and more than 10,000 children.
The Child Guarantee programme instructs governments to allocate sufficient resources to the objective. These resources are to be drawn both from national budgets and from a number of existing EU resources, such as the EU Social Fund Plus, the EU Regional Development Fund and other European facilities. Countries most affected by child poverty are instructed to allocate a minimum 5% of their share of European Social Fund Plus budgets to the Child Guarantee. In theory, there should therefore be no financial obstacle to allocating government and EU money to children who have a parent in prison.
UNICEF is currently running pilot projects in Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Lithuania and Spain. Their interim report, available here, provides some useful information.
We urge you to reach out to your relevant government contacts without delay, while the national action plans are being drafted and before they are finalised. If you need support or further information from COPE, do reach out to Liz Ayre or Brianna Smith at contact[@]networkcope.eu.