Children’s Participation in the Justice System

The rights of children in youth justice and civil court proceedings, and in particular the right of children to be heard or to “participate” in such systems, is an area in which there has been much interest in recent years, particularly sparked by Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. There are a wide variety of proceedings in which children’s interests are decided, for example, where they are accused of a crime, where their parents are in dispute on family breakdown and where there are child protection concerns. This chapter examines recent developments in standards at international level concerning children’s participation in proceedings, such as the drafting of General Comment No. 12 of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child on the right to be heard and the Guidelines on Child-friendly Justice of the Council of Europe. It draws on recent international research in order to provide analysis of the extent to which such standards have affected practice and made a difference for children. It concludes that although the development of such standards is to be welcomed, and although these standards have achieved some improvements at domestic level, the more extensive modifications required for genuine participation of children in the justice system has not occurred.Effective Protection of Fundamental Rights in a pluralist worl

Managing local labour markets and making up new spaces of welfare

The dissolution of the old mechanisms of state welfare has not yet led to the generation of a new welfare settlement, although the rise of neoliberalism and of what Jessop has called the Schumpeterian Competition State have highlighted some key directions of change. The importance of geographical inequality and unevenness to the process of reshaping welfare has been widely recognised, and the fragmentation and decentralisation of employment and social policies are giving rise to the production of new welfare spaces, which institutionalise the new arrangements, helping to make up neoliberalism in practice. These issues are discussed with the help of case studies of two contrasting areas: Sheffield, a city recently experiencing economic restructuring and high levels of labour-market adjustment and employment deprivation; and Milton Keynes, a city which has been a growth area within the South East since the 1960s and which is earmarked for further employment and the location of planned population and employment growth. The ways in which new welfare spaces are being produced is explored through a consideration of the configuration of partnerships around the governance of workfare, welfare, and competitiveness within these cities

Governing the contaminated city: infrastructure and sanitation in colonial and postcolonial Bombay

This paper examines specific ways in which sanitation infrastructure matter politically both as a set of materials and as a discursive object in colonial and postcolonial Bombay. It reflects on a history of sanitation as a set of concepts which can both historicise seemingly ‘new’ practices and shed light on the contemporary city. It considers two moments in Bombay’s ‘sanitary history’ – the mid-nineteenth century and the present day – and elucidates the distinct and changing spatial imaginaries and logics of sanitation in their broad relation to urbanization and nature. The paper conceptualises colonial discourses of a ‘contaminated city’ and public health, and finds productive sites of intersection between these discourses and contemporary debates and practices in Bombay, including bourgeois environmentalism, discourses of the ‘world city’, and logics of community-managed sanitation infrastructures. It highlights an important role for urban comparativism, in the context of different imaginaries and logics, in both cases. By connecting infrastructure, public health discourses and modes of urban government, the paper traces a specific historical geography of cyborg urbanization that is always already splintered, unequal and contested. For the urban poor in particular, much is at stake in how the sanitary city is constructed as a problem, how the solutions to it are mobilized, and how improvement is measured