The Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland has told ministers their religious observance bill is incompatible with UN convention on children’s rights. The commissioner was responding to a consultation on a new bill which our CEO Fraser Sutherland has called “half-baked and ill-considered”.
The Children’s Commissioner has warned the Scottish government that its plans to reform religious observance legislation do not go nearly far enough to uphold children’s rights. In her response to a government consultation, the commissioner noted that young people she had engaged with “felt that they should be able to choose to withdraw from (or opt into) religious observance”.
The commissioner added that a new government proposal on religious observance failed to “empower children to make a decision on their participation in collective worship”. She also noted that the bill does “not…represent significant progress towards UNCRC compliance”.
After years of claiming they were ‘considering’ the issue, ministers have admitted they know very little about how religious observance and the opt-out system is actually operating.
Ministers’ plans follow the passage of landmark UNCRC incorporation legislation in 2024. This compels public services in Scotland to embed children’s rights in everything they do. The Scottish government has stated the new bill would ensure children’s rights were respected. The proposed amendment would pass into law school pupils’ right to share their views on religious observance. But it would not give them the right to opt out of religious observance.
After years of claiming they were “considering” the issue, ministers have now also admitted they know very little about how religious observance and the opt-out system is actually operating. Yet they have chosen to bring forward a proposal that would change nothing in practice and continue to deny school pupils choice and agency.
In our own response to the consultation we strongly criticised offering opt-out rights to parents and guardians while denying them to children. Under the current set-up, school pupils, no matter their age, maturity, or personal beliefs, are deemed incapable of making decisions on attending religious observance. Parents’ views are used as a proxy for their children’s. This enshrines in law the incorrect and unethical idea that parents can dictate their child’s beliefs and ideas without exception.
Our CEO Fraser Sutherland says:
“The Scottish government has sat on this now for the best part of a decade and rather than grasp the issue it has brought forward a half-baked and ill-considered response. It is not right that in this day and age, in a majority non-religious country such as Scotland, young people are being made to sit through compulsory Christian worship regardless of their beliefs, religious or not.”
Our response to the consultation has been reported in Scottish Legal News.
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