London
54 Doughty Street
London
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020 7404 1313
DOUGHTY STREET CHAMBERS CHILDREN’S RIGHTS GROUP ANNUAL CHILDREN’S RIGHTS LECTURE 2024
Thursday 13 March 2025, 17.30 – 19:00 GMT, followed by a 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.
The Children’s Rights Group at Doughty Street Chambers is delighted that this year’s Children’s Rights Lecture will be delivered by Professor Sonia Livingstone, who will be speaking on ‘Children’s Rights Apply Online as Offline – or Do They? Emerging Challenges in Implementing Children’s Rights in the Digital Environment’. Sonia will be joined by Nicole Stoilova who will share a youth perspective on the issues raised in the lecture.
The expectation that children’s rights apply online as offline has been reinforced by recent developments in law and policy. But ensuring this is reflected in practice is proving challenging in multiple ways. Society is struggling with the sheer scale of the problems children face that appear linked to the digital environment, as well as the seeming unaccountability of global tech companies. Finding the ‘solutions’ to these problems, however, will change the internet as we know it, for better and for worse. Drawing on examples of efforts to regulate and redesign children’s digital learning, safety and play, this lecture examines some of the ways in which children’s rights are beginning to be applied online – and the barriers that remain.
Sonia Livingstone DPhil (Oxon), OBE, FBA, FBPS, FAcSS, FRSA, is a professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has published 21 books on media audiences, children and young people’s risks and opportunities, media literacy and rights in the digital environment, including “Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children’s lives” (OUP 2020). Since founding the EC-funded 33 country “EU Kids Online” research network, and Global Kids Online (with UNICEF Office of Research-Innocenti), she has advised the Council of Europe, European Commission, European Parliament, UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, OECD, ITU and UNICEF. She is currently leading the Digital Futures for Children centre at LSE with the 5Rights Foundation.
The event will be chaired by Professor Aoife Nolan, co-lead of the Children’s Rights Group at Doughty Street Chambers.
The lecture will be followed by an expert panel discussion, including:
- Associate Kay Firth-Butterfield, Doughty Street Chambers
- Leo Ratledge, Co-Director of the Child Rights International Network (CRIN)
- Jen Persson, founder of the not-for-profit organisation, Defend Digital Me
- Tracey Gyateng is the co-founder of Data, Tech and Black Communities (DTBC)
The panel discussion will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience.
Panel Biographies
Aoife Nolan is an internationally recognised expert in human rights law, with a particular focus on economic and social rights and children's rights. Aoife Co-leads Doughty Street Chambers' Children's Rights Group and is a member of the Doughty Street International Steering Group. She is Professor of International Human Rights Law at the School of the Law, University of Nottingham, where she is also Director of the Human Rights Law Centre's Economic and Social Rights Unit. Aoife is President of the Council of Europe's European Committee of Social Rights, the leading European monitoring mechanism on economic and social rights, having joined the Committee in 2017 and served as Vice-President in 2021-2.
Read the full profile here.
Kay Firth-Butterfield is the CEO of Good Tech Advisory. TIME 100 Impact Awardee 2024 , Who’s Who Emerging Innovator 2024 and Who’s Who in America, Forbes 50 over 50. She was the Inaugural and former Head of Artificial Intelligence and member of the Executive Committee at the World Economic Forum and, in 2014, became the World’s first Chief AI Ethics Officer. She is one of the foremost experts in the world on the governance of AI. Kay is a Barrister, former Judge and Professor, technologist and entrepreneur who has an abiding interest in how humanity can benefit from new technologies, especially AI.
Read the full profile here.
Leo Ratledge is a Co-Director of the Child Rights International Network (CRIN). He leads on legal and policy work within CRIN and is jointly responsible for the organisation’s strategy and direction. He has worked internationally on the human rights of children since 2010, particularly specialising on access to justice for children, addressing impunity for sexual violence and addressing how children’s rights are impacted by emerging technologies.
As founder of the not-for-profit organisation, Defend Digital Me, Jen campaigns for children’s privacy and digital rights in the UK state education system and the wider public sector. Reports and research are available at https://defenddigitalme.org/research/ including on AI, Biometrics, EdTech, and Data Protection law. Jen is a current contributor to the Council of Europe digital citizenship working group on AI and Education, and supported the Committee of Convention 108 in the drafting of Council of Europe Guidelines for Data Protection in Education Settings, adopted in 2020.
Tracey Gyateng is the co-founder of Data, Tech and Black Communities (DTBC), a community-based organisation dedicated to ensuring that data and data-driven technologies enhance Black communities, rather than curtail or surveil them. She has spent over 20 years researching and developing supportive mechanisms to enable communities and not-for-profit organisations to ethically and legally use data to support people to live and thrive. In addition to her work with DTBC, Tracey serves as a trustee of Access Social Care and a board member of Open Data Manchester. She previously held leadership roles as Deputy Chief Executive of 360Giving and Community Data Principal at The Legal Education Foundation. Alongside her voluntary commitments, she also balances caregiving responsibilities.
