Doughty Street Chambers Children’s Rights Group Annual Children’s Rights Lecture 2023

Doughty Street Chambers Children’s Rights Group Annual Children’s Rights Lecture 2023

Thursday 2 November 2023, 17.30 – 19:00 GMT, followed by a drinks reception until 20:00 GMT.

Every year, in November, the international community celebrates World Children’s Day. It is a key opportunity to promote awareness of children’s rights and what is needed to achieve them.

This year’s Children’s Rights Lecture will be taking place in person and will feature a keynote lecture from Lord Dubs. He will be speaking on “Refugee Children and their Rights”, with a particular focus on their rights in context of immigration, advocacy, protection and mental health support.

Lord Dubs is a Labour politician and leading refugee rights advocate. He was MP for Battersea 1979-1987, during which time he served for four years as a shadow Home Office Minister.

After leaving the Commons in 1987, he became the Director of the Refugee Council and was appointed as a Labour life peer in 1994.

In 1997, after Labour’s election victory, he was appointed as a Minister in Northern Ireland where he served until the establishment of a new devolved administration following the Good Friday Agreement.

In 2016, he sponsored an amendment (which later became known as the “Dubs Amendment”) to the Immigration Act 2016, to offer some unaccompanied refugee children stranded in camps in Europe safe passage to Britain, having himself arrived in Britain in 1939 as a six-year-old refugee fleeing the Nazis in Czechoslovakia.

He currently serves on the British Irish Parliamentary Assembly and on the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly. He continues to campaign on human rights and specifically on behalf of refugees.

The event will be chaired by Shu Shin Luh, co-team leader for the Children’s Rights Group at Doughty Street Chambers.

The lecture will be followed by an expert panel discussion, as well as a Q&A session with the audience. The panellists will be:

• Antonia Benfield, barrister at Doughty Street Chambers.
• Mariam Bafo, policy and public affairs officer at We Belong, a charity for and by young migrants.
• Hilda Opoku, a young woman care leaver who arrived in the UK unaccompanied.

The event brochure is available here.