What is the Code for Children’s Rights and why is it so important?
Digital technologies and services, among which various apps and games, play an increasingly important role in children’s lives. While digital technologies and services make a valuable contribution to children’s development, however, practice has shown that the design choices related to their development are not always made in the best interests of the child. This may negatively affect children in many ways and form a barrier to the protection of their rights, for instance in terms of online safety for children, the privacy rights of the child in the digital world, the right to protect children from economic exploitation, and the online manipulation of children. Children’s rights must safeguard that children have sufficient freedom to develop and to participate in society, while at the same time being protected against possible harmful influences. As such, it is important that digital technologies and services are designed in a childfriendly manner.
In collaboration with the De Waag Technology & Society and commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, Simone van der Hof of the eLaw Centre for Law and Digital Technologies has drawn up a code for digital children’s rights based on the example of the age appropriate design code in Great Britain. The aim of the code is to give technology designers and developers concrete tips and tools for the implementation of children’s rights in their products to ensure that new technologies exposed to children – whether directly or indirectly – are created with the best interest of the child in mind from the very start. As such, the code consists of ten principles, which are not in themselves legally enforceable, but are based on law and regulations (such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989) which are considered to be legally binding.
In this episode of The Law of Tech Podcast, I explored the origins and contents of the Code for Children’s Rights with Simone van der Hof, Academic Director and Professor of Law and Digital Technologies at Leiden Law School.
To learn more about the Code for Children’s Rights, check out the full document in English here: https://codevoorkinderrechten.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Code-voor-Kinderrechten-EN.pdf.
For more information, head to the website (Dutch): https://codevoorkinderrechten.nl/.
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