Child Code: Will This Reform Finally Protect Our Children?

A text to simplify and make rights more readable

Today, children’s rights are scattered across a multitude of texts: civil code, public health code, criminal code, social action code and families … Ultimately, professionals and families are often lost in this legal labyrinth.

The child code project therefore proposes a simplification. Concretely, It would be a question of bringing together the main rules relating to the protection of minors in a single documentto justice for minors, but also to the fundamental rights of children.

The goal is to make the law more readable and more easily mobilized for parents, educators, social workers and, of course, the children themselves.

The rights of the child at the center of the project

The bill is based on a strong principle: Recognize the child as an object of law in his own right. It therefore intends to enshrine, in a clear and centralized way, some principles already established in the International Convention on the Rights of the Child (CIDE), which France ratified in 1990.

This concerns in particular:

• the right to be protected from any form of violence,
• the right to access quality education,
• the right to health,
• The right to express his opinion and to be heard in decisions that concern him. In other words, ensuring that the child’s word is no longer an option, but an obligation.

The text aims to better articulate the responsibility of parents, the mission of the state and the word of the child, to avoid gray areas in sometimes complex situations (for example in cases of placement or legal proceedings).

A reform that also concerns juvenile justice

In addition to social protection, the children’s code will include juvenile justice. This means that rules relating to children’s criminal responsibility, their educational support or even judicial protection measures would be grouped within this new framework.

This integration would make it possible to give greater coherence to a system which, even today, it is based on scattered and sometimes contradictory laws. The idea is also to remember that justice for minors must remain above all educational and protective and not just repressive.

A strong political and symbolic signal

For the initiators of the bill, it is about sending a strong signal: the child is not just “a future adult”, but a person who has rights now. Create a childhood code, It is to affirm that society gives itself the means to better protect and support its youngest citizens.

It remains to be seen how the text will be received in parliament. Like any magnitude reform, it will require arbitration, particularly to harmonize existing laws and avoid duplication. But the will displayed is clear: to put the best interests of the child at the center of public policies.

A tool intended for the field

For years, associations, magistrates and childcare professionals have requested simplification. For them, this code would be a clear and accessible reference tool. A way to create rights that sometimes remain theoretical.

For families, it is also a promise: that of no longer having to search through an administrative jungle for what should be obvious. Know that their child has the right to be protected, heard and clean and above all know how to assert these rights.

The baby code doesn’t exist yet, and it will likely take months of debate before we know what it will actually look like. But if it was born, the situation could change: less complexity, more readability and above all a clear recognition of children as subjects of the law. Another step towards a company that truly places the interests of the child at the center of its choices.

Source: Madmoizelle