Providing legal advice to children and young people requires particular expertise and a high degree of specialisation. What is it that enables us to advise children, to mediate, to make recommendations and to initiate further reform towards a child-friendly legal system? Here, we offer an insight into the skills profile of our advisors.
In putting our team together, we concentrated on two areas: legal expertise and strong social skills in interaction with children and young people. This results in the advisory expertise we offer today – to children and young people requiring legal assistance as well as to specialists in the Swiss legal system.
Legal studies form the basis of our expertise. Another factor that binds us is long-standing practical experience in the context of legal proceedings involving children and young people. Our team members combine all of this with practical experience and further training in the fields of developmental psychology and dialogue, as well as negotiation skills that allow them to gauge the interests of participants and resolve conflict. This helps us adapt our consulting precisely to the needs of children and young people – especially children with disabilities.
We’re committed to improving the way we communicate with children and young people all the time. Regular supervision and peer consultation with specialists from the field of child psychology and other disciplines help us gain further insight for our work. Here, we also focus on issues of empathy and self-reflection – as well as how to set reasonable boundaries for ourselves in consultations and maintain an appropriate emotional and professional distance to the children.
Our advisors specialise in the following legal fields in particular
- Civil law
- Family law
- Adoption law
- Matrimonial law
- Divorce and separation
- Child protection law
- Medical law
- Swiss Code of Obligations (e.g. contractual law)
- Family law
- Personal law (e.g. rights to the protection of privacy, naming rights)
Criminal law- Juvenile criminal law
- Victim support law
- Criminal law IEL
- Administrative law
- Asylum rights
- Residency law
- Health law
- School law/social law
- Social insurance law
- Procedural law
- International law
- International private law (e.g. child abduction, divorce, child protection)
- European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)
- United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)
- Child-friendly justice guidelines
To deliver the best possible integrated service for children and young people, we work closely with a pool of qualified, experienced legal experts who provide us with extensive support in fields such as asylum law. This network helps us to make informed decisions for the best solution in each case.
What do we do?
Our team offers children and young people security and guidance in legal issues. The Ombud platform provides them with general information about their rights and a dictionary of key terms, and also allows them to contact our advisors via chat, video call, phone or email. Our advisors provide case-specific, age-appropriate information about the child’s rights and mediate between the child and specialists on site.
Our second sphere of activity focuses on raising awareness and advising specialists in the Swiss legal system. Our team provides a range of advisory and support services such as a training search and a knowledge portal. We offer federal and cantonal authorities a five-phase concept to guide them on the path towards a child-friendly legal system.
Our service fills the gap until we have a public ombudsperson role for children’s rights as recommended by parliament through a motion tabled by Ruedi Noser.
