Better legal protection for vulnerable families in protection of juveniles

News item | 18-11-2024 | 15:30

As Minister Struycken explains, “Each child has the right to grow up and develop in a safe home environment. But sometimes a child’s safety is at issue. For example, if the court imposes a placement in care or supervision order, this is very drastic for parents and children. This impacts on the right to a family life. Such a measure should therefore only be an extreme measure, and should be used with the utmost caution. Parents and children should also always be protected and be able to fall back on the law. They need to be better heard, seen and supported when they are facing a child protection order.”

Free legal aid

Under the bill, parents will be entitled to free legal aid if they face the first enforced placement into care of their child, or termination of their parental authority. With the support of a lawyer, parents have a more equal position vis-à-vis the Child Protection Board or a youth protection worker from a certified institution, before, during and after the hearing at the children’s court. They are better heard, informed and know better what to expect. The current free legal aid pilot scheme will be extended until a structural arrangement is in place. The commitment is to expand this free legal aid to the so-called extension procedures, in which the court assesses whether the existing measure should be extended or not.

Promoting return placement

The primary goal of a placement in care is to protect the child. After that, it is important for parents to be able to resume caring for their child as soon as possible. This principle of ‘working towards a return placement’ is enshrined in the law. For this, it is very important that there is contact between parent and child during the placement in care. A visitation plan will therefore become a mandatory part of the law. Within six weeks of being placed out of the home, the youth protection service organisation must draw up a plan for this with the parent(s). This should include exploring the possibilities for contact between the child and any siblings. The bill also states that siblings will be placed together as much as possible.

Childraising perspective

In order to maintain the prospect of the child returning to his/her own family, it is important that the first request for placement in care includes clarity on where the child will be raised in the near future. This is referred to as the childraising perspective. The bill will explicitly place the decision on this matter with the children’s court. Even if there is an extension of the placement in care order. This allows the children’s court to make adjustments if it appears that the options for a return have not yet been sufficiently investigated.

Preventing placement in care

Placement in care decisions have a major impact on both children’s and parents’ rights to a family life. Current practice also shows that a placement in care does not always lead to improvement for the child. This requires careful consideration of whether placement in care is the best means to protect the child’s safety or whether there are less intrusive ways to protect the child. This is referred to as the subsidiarity principle. The law will add the principle of subsidiarity to the legal grounds for a family supervision order and placement in care. With the aim that these measures are used only as a last resort.

After consultation on the bill, it will be submitted to the Council of State for advice, after which it will be submitted to the House of Representatives in 2025.