A year has passed since the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers released Recommendation CM/Rec(2018)5 concerning children with imprisoned parents to their member states. A landmark series of recommendations honouring the rights of children of incarcerated parents and establishing standards for the promotion of those rights, the Recommendation includes protocols and obligations for police, prison and justice departments that recognise and uphold the rights of the child while working within a framework that holds the best interests of each child paramount.
COPE also wrote an accompanying Implementation Guide to assist member states and stakeholders—the judiciary, health and social sectors, prison staff, police, schools, NGOs, child rights advocates and parents’ associations—in putting those suggestions and protocols into effect. This guide aims to provide a framework that can be implemented across Europe in every national context, and that serves as a reference document for developing child rights policies, reviewing legislation, and training prison and probation staff.
CM/Rec(2018)5 has been a touchstone document since its publication a year ago, providing a policy foundation for COPE’s work in 2018 and the first months of 2019. 2018’s ‘Not My Crime, Still My Sentence’ campaign was a logical extension of the the Recommendation: COPE and its partners organised youth focus groups around Europe that each translated a single article of the Recommendation into child-friendly language, ultimately transforming all 56 Recommendation articles into much more accessible language.
The 2018 conference ‘Keeping Children Connected: Progress and Parental Imprisonment from a Child’s Perspective’, held in Manchester, UK not two months after the publication of CM/Rec(2018)5, focused both on progress made in programmes related to children of imprisoned parents and on the role of technology in facilitating the sustenance of the child-parent bond. The conference was multi-sectoral, engaging prison and police professionals, academics and the organisational sector with special attention paid to the role prisons have in mediating the child-parent relationship, and echoing the Recommendation’s calls for considering the child’s wellbeing when making decisions surrounding a parent’s imprisonment, collecting data on children with imprisoned parents, and monitoring the implementation of the recommendations. COPE’s 2019 conference, entitled ‘Bridging the Gap: Boosting the visibility, voices and cross-sectoral support of children who have a parent in prison’, will revisit and build upon the 2018 conference and will again be underpinned by the Council of Europe’s Recommendation.
CM/Rec(2018)5 has also been used as a framework for COPE’s work developing programs with its partners, including a support program for fathers imprisoned in Bulgaria. Emerging from a Bulgarian action designed by COPE and the organisation Child & Space in Bulgaria’s Sliven prison, Papa Plus as a programme can be seen as a response to many of the Council of Europe’s Recommendations in its focus on the protection of children’s rights and wellbeing by supporting the bond between father and child—and in so doing supporting a more respectful and calm prison atmosphere. The program leans heavily on training programs for prison officers, social inspector staff, family training practitioners, and on cross-sectoral information sharing.
In the organisational sector, COPE’s contributions to the UN Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty—in a research group dedicated to Children Living in Places of Detention with their Parents—is a continuation of the Council of Europe Recommendations, notably Articles 34-40 on infants in prison. At the April 2019 convening of the research group, Nuala Mole of the AIRE Centre, UK, called specifically for the UN Global Study to provide a “practical and effective response to the Council of Europe recommendation.”