LINK – Victim Support Europe

The LINK project – Linking Information for Adaptive and Accessible Child-Friendly Courts – brings together 11 partners from 9 countries with the aim to improve the accessibility of and integration of child protection systems in criminal proceedings for children with intellectual and/or psychosocial disabilities.

The partnership aims to build the capacity of criminal justice professionals to guarantee non-discrimination of child victims with intellectual and/or psychosocial disabilities through good practices and awareness-raising activities and to optimise or develop integration and multidisciplinary cooperation of child protection systems and processes in criminal proceedings.

This project is implemented through a combination of mapping of information needs and recommendations of children with disabilities; development of a blueprint or proof of concept for a child-friendly accessible technological system; capacity-building activities to train criminal justice professionals and relevant stakeholders; and organisation of national children’s advisory boards, national roundtables and international conferences for the dissemination of project results and broader involvement of civil society, criminal justice professionals and children with disabilities.

The project, funded by the CERV programme of the European Commission, runs for 24 months and started in June 2023.

If you have any project-related questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to Antonio De Martin at: a.demartin@victimsupporteurope.eu

Partners

Objectives of the project

The objectives of the project are to:

Raise awareness of criminal justice, child protection and other relevant professionals on how to overcome participation barriers experienced by child victims with intellectual and/or psychosocial disabilities in the criminal justice system;
Build capacity of criminal justice and child protection professionals to ensure multidisciplinary individual assessments that provide procedural accommodations in the criminal justice system;
Optimise cooperation and coordination between civil society, child protection system and criminal justice professionals to better support and protect child through the establishment of model multidisciplinary cooperation practices with children with and without disabilities and policymakers and justice administrators.

Activities under the project

Improve knowledge and awareness on accessibility to criminal justice for children with disabilities
Develop accessible Information Systems in the criminal justice system
Child and Disability Sensitive Capacity Building
Conduct communication and dissemination activities

Expected outcomes

National Briefing Papers
International Synthesis Report
National Multidisciplinary cooperation System
National Roundtables and Trainings
Child Advisory Boards
International Symposium
Accessible materials on the project content

Funding programme:

CERV Programme

DISCLAIMER: Co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.