2013-01-10
National Audit Office: lack of both resources and coordination hinders addressing child rights protection issues
Country's development prospects largely depend on the attention given to children today. Given the fact that children is one of the most vulnerable social groups, effective protection of child rights and interests should be among the most important state priorities. The National Audit Office of Lithuania has performed an audit of the protection and safeguarding of child interests and rights in Lithuania.
“We see that problems in the field of child rights protection have not been going down for many years already: the child rights protection process has been organised inefficiently and work with social risk families and children has not been producing tangible results," said Auditor General Giedrė Švedienė.
The audit of the organisation of child rights protection was performed in the Ministry of Social Security and Labour, State Child Rights Protection and Adoption Service under the Ministry of Social Security and Labour, and in all municipalities of the country; also, interviews were conducted with other relevant authorities.
The evaluation of the audit findings showed that high workload and lack of other resources have resulted in failure to properly organise child's legal representation and protection of child rights in legal proceedings. For example, there are 700 children for one specialist at the Child Rights Protection Division (CRPD) in Pagėgiai and Neringa municipalities and as many as 3152 children in Vilnius city municipality. Due to lack of funding CRPDs in more than half of the municipalities have no lawyers. In addition, most municipalities have no or limited access to necessary registers and information systems. The Ministry of Social Security and Labour (MSSL) has not established any criteria of assessment of family living conditions (only two municipalities have adopted procedures for assessment of family and child's living conditions), therefore CRPD officials assess family living conditions subjectively or formally. As a result, opinions provided by CRPDs to courts examining various cases related to child interests are often of insufficient quality, and the opinion provision practice leads to irrational use of resources. Also, children’s rights in criminal proceedings are not safeguarded – children are often interrogated in premises which are not specifically designed for such purpose and without participation of child rights protection specialists and psychologists.
Over the period 2008–2012 more than 52 thousand children took part in biomedical research, with 710 children taking part in clinical trials of medicinal products; however, the Lithuanian Bioethics Committee, Regional Biomedical Research Ethics Committees and the State Medicines Control Agency, which are supposed to ensure control of such trials and patients’ well-being, since 2009 have not checked any trial which involved children. These authorities also have to ensure protection of children's interests in research, therefore participation of CRPDs, which are not competent to assess medical aspects of research, in this process, as provided for in the Law on Ethics of Biomedical Research, is not appropriate and results in inefficient use of CRPDs resources.
30-40 per cent of social risk families have been receiving social services for more than five years, however, the reasons determining the inclusion of the families in the social risk group have not disappeared. Not all municipalities have been registering children at social risk, the number of social risk families in more than half municipalities is 25 per cent higher than shown in centralised accounts. The MSSL has not provided for any criteria for differentiating families by the level of complexity and nature of problems and neither has it set any criteria for assessing threats to the child’s life, health and safety, or established a procedure for taking children into care (only one municipality has a procedure for taking children into care in place), so this risk has often been assessed inadequately – it often happens that children are taken into care and then returned back to the family 2-3 times.
Medical institutions have not always been informing the CRPDs about potential violations of child rights. Methodological guidelines for working with social risk families developed by the MSSL need to be improved because of improper assessment of the demand of social services and inadequate planning of work with families – plans of individual work with social risk families include tasks that are insurmountable for parents (to repair a home), vague (to take proper care of children), or unrelated to the solution of the main problem (to go to the Labour Exchange). Not all municipalities have a developed network of social services, with the existing network being able to meet the demand of only 19 per cent of children in social risk families; however, the MSSL has been allocating funding for child day care centres without giving priority to municipalities which lack services of such centres. Minimum child care measures for children prone to crime (to be at home at specified time, not to go to places having a negative impact on the child's behaviour, not to communicate with people having a negative impact on the child) have not been implemented because the Ministry of Education and Science has not developed a respective methodology.
Help provided to children on telephone 116111 is not sufficient. Only 4 per cent of calls are answered today and calls are taken only from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., meanwhile in most other countries such help to children is provided 24 hours a day.