Our legal work

We are currently (November 2025) completing our work as a core participant in module 8 of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, which is focused on how the pandemic, and the actions and inactions of government and others, affected children and young people.

UK Covid-19 Inquiry – dedicated module on children and young people (2024-25)

Article 39 was granted core participant status for Module 8 of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry at the end of July 2024. We gave written and oral evidence to the Inquiry between August and October 2025, aimed at assisting the Inquiry’s investigation into the following areas:

• The immediate and longer-term effects on children of secondary legislation introduced by the government during the first lockdown which deleted or diluted 65 child safeguards;
• Government decision-making prior to and after the introduction of this secondary legislation;
• The government’s specific failure to consult the Children’s Commissioner for England;
• The role of the Chief Social Worker for Children and Families in government decision-making during this time; and
• The particular harms suffered by children in custody during the pandemic.

We sent our closing written submissions to the Inquiry on 28 November 2025 and now await the report from this Module (anticipated to be somewhere between the end of 2026 and Spring 2027). Read more about our work on the Inquiry here.

Past strategic litigation 

Below we summarise the other strategic litigation we have undertaken to promote and protect the rights of children and young people.

Inquest into the death of a young care leaver (2024-25) 

In November 2024, Article 39 and the charity INQUEST were granted Interested Person (IP) status in the inquest of 18-year-old Nonita Grabovskyte who died shortly after she ceased being looked after by the London Borough of Barnet. Nonita had been living in supported accommodation, despite being very vulnerable.

This kind of accommodation is meant to be used by local authorities only when a child in care aged 16 or 17 is deemed ready to live with a high degree of independence and has no need for day-to-day care or consistent adult supervision. After Nonita’s tragic death, Article 39 was approached by her official befriender, Katharine Bryson, who had made safeguarding referrals while she was still alive.

It is believed this is the first time that a non-governmental organisation has been granted IP status despite not knowing or being in contact with the deceased person before they died. Section 47(2)(m) of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 empowers a senior coroner to appoint a person as an IP if they have a “sufficient interest” in the inquest process.

The inquest took place in May 2025 and the Coroner found a catalogue of failings by Nonita’s corporate parent and others.

In November 2025, Sky broadcast a powerful documentary about Nonita’s life in care and preventable death. Article 39’s founder and former director, Carolyne Willow, and Deborah Coles, INQUEST’s Executive Director, alongside award-winning actress Sam Morton, who grew up in care, appear in the documentary. More here.

Intervention in a Court of Appeal case concerned with the deprivation of liberty of children in care (2024-25) 

In June 2024, in a case concerning a disabled boy, ‘J’, who was then aged 14 and living in a children’s home where he was subject to restrictions amounting to deprivation of liberty, Lieven J held that a deprivation of liberty order from the High Court was unnecessary because his local authority, once it had obtained a care order, could give valid consent through its exercise of parental responsibility.

A local authority obtains parental responsibility for a child when they are made the subject of an interim care order or a care order.

Lieven J held that J’s right to liberty, protected through Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), would not be breached through his local authority deciding to deprive him of his liberty “because all agree it is in his best interests to remain at the children’s home” with extensive restrictions. It was therefore “quite difficult to see what the point of [a deprivation of liberty] order is on the facts of a case like J’s”. The court found the local authority was able to give valid consent to deprive him of his liberty “in order to keep him safe”, protect his right to life under Article 2 ECHR and ensure his best interests.

In October 2024, Article 39 and the charity Mind were granted permission to intervene jointly in the appeal of the High Court decision, which was heard in the Court of Appeal over two days in February 2025. The Court of Appeal held that local authorities do not have the power to consent to the confinement of children in care. A local authority confining a child in care without authorisation of the court would be acting in breach of Article 5 ECHR. Judgment here.

Tribunal orders release of safeguarding report concerned with the deaths and serious harm of children in care (2023)

In September 2023, an information rights tribunal ruled that the Department for Education had to release a report to Article 39, which reviewed 48 separate incidents where children in care died or suffered serious harm (judgment here).

The report was produced by the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, and shared with the Department for Education during judicial review proceedings in 2021/22 brought by Article 39 that challenged secondary legislation which, from September 2021, restricts the types of placements for children in care aged 15 and under, so that they can no longer be accommodated in properties not registered or inspected by Ofsted or the Care Quality Commission, or in properties where they receive no day-to-day care. The same protection was not provided for children in care aged 16 and 17.

A short summary of the Panel’s report, published in May 2021, led Article 39 to believe that its contents were highly relevant to policy development concerned with the safety and welfare of older children in care. We therefore sought the full report from the Department for Education via a freedom of information request in December 2021. The request was refused in February 2022, with the Department for Education stating that the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel had shared the report with it in confidence and disclosure would damage relationships between the Panel and government. The Information Commissioner backed this refusal in October 2022.

Article 39’s case was heard by tribunal Judge Stephen Roper, sitting with members Aimée Gasston and Paul Taylor, in May 2023. The tribunal found that section 36(2)(c) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 – prejudice to the effective conduct of public affairs – was engaged, but that the public interest favoured disclosure. The Department for Education was ordered to provide Article 39 with the full report within 30 days of receiving the decision, and was also found to have breached section 10 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 by not responding to Article 39’s request for information within 20 working days. Drawing on submissions made by Article 39, the tribunal’s judgment sets out a number of compelling public interest reasons for disclosure:

73. We consider that there are also other public interest factors in favour of disclosure of the Report, including:
(a) a need for transparency in child safeguarding, due to its protective function;
(b) a need to promote and protect the human rights of children, especially children in care who are said to be among the most vulnerable in society;
(c) a need for openness and transparency regarding the role of the DfE relating to child protection and relating to the safety and well-being of children in care;
(d) the number of people in society (including children and their families) who are likely to have an interest in, or may benefit from, the information in the Report; 
(e) wider general public interest in the issues raised in the Report, including with regard to the experiences of children in care; and,
(f) the need for public scrutiny and potential challenge or debate regarding any relevant issues, including in the spirit of driving improvement to public services and child protection.

High Court affirms that unaccompanied children are protected by the Children Act 1989 (2023)

Since July 2021, the Home Office had been housing in hotels children who arrive in the UK on small boats without family or carers. As of 24 January 2023, over 4,600 children had been put into Home Office-run hotels and children had gone missing on more than 440 occasions. Two hundred children were still missing at that time.

With the backing of the Good Law Project, in response to whistleblower allegations that children had been abducted from a hotel in Brighton and Hove, we sought urgent protection for this group of children through a wardship application in the Family Division of the High Court. Hearings took place on 24 March and 18 April 2023. At the first hearing, the Home Office reported that 66 children remained missing from this single hotel. By the time of the High Court’s judgment, in June 2023, 23 children remained missing. (Article 39 did not seek through these proceedings, and was not provided with, details of the missing children).

We argued that there is a lacuna in protection since individual missing children have no ‘corporate parent’ responsible for their safety and welfare. Brighton and Hove Safeguarding Children Partnership had, at the end of February 2023, published a report which stated that “the status of [unaccompanied asylum-seeking] children remains ‘in limbo’. They do not have looked after children or child in need status with the Local Authority and the Home Office has no statutory responsibility for their care. This creates a significant statutory gap in provision and leaves the child with no corporate parent”. 

The High Court judgment confirmed that:

• Unaccompanied children have the same right to protection under the Children Act 1989 as other children who are without parents and carers.
• The Home Office housing children in hotels does not diminish the legal responsibilities and duties of local authorities: “the [Children Act 1989] sets out a comprehensive scheme for the protection of children in need in a local authority area. The provisions that I have set out above show the breadth of that statutory scheme. If the children were present in Brighton and Hove and met the statutory criteria then they would be the responsibility of a local authority, in all probability Brighton and Hove” (paragraph 34).
• Wardship protection (under the High Court’s inherent jurisdiction power) is not available for unaccompanied children who have been housed in Home Office-run hotels because the Children Act 1989 protects them. Mrs Justice Lieven reiterated “the fundamental constitutional principle that where there is a statutory scheme, the Court should only use the inherent jurisdiction if there is a lacuna” (paragraph 33).
• Local authorities who fail to fulfil their statutory duties towards unaccompanied children in their area can be held accountable through judicial review: “I should make clear, that even if there were issues around how actively efforts were being made to find the children, this would not give a proper basis for the Court to exercise the inherent jurisdiction. If the relevant agencies were not exercising their statutory powers correctly, and there is no evidence that is the case, then the remedy would be judicial review and not the use of the inherent jurisdiction. There is no lacuna in the statutory scheme which would justify the exercise of that jurisdiction” (paragraph 37).

High Court finds secondary legislation does not discriminate against 16 and 17 year-olds in care (2022)

In March 2022, the High Court handed down its judgment on controversial secondary legislation which protects children in care aged 15 and under but not those aged 16 and 17. It rejected all three grounds of Article 39’s legal challenge: that the Education Secretary irrationally discriminated against 16 and 17 year-olds; that he did not fulfil his equality duties; and a consultation undertaken by the Department for Education was unfair.

The secondary legislation, in force from September 2021, bans local authorities from placing younger children in properties which do not provide care. It does this by listing the types of settings in which children in care aged 15 and under can live, when they are not able to live with family members, foster carers or in children’s homes. Each of the settings in the secondary legislation guarantees care where children live, and they are registered and inspected by Ofsted or the Care Quality Commission, sometimes both.

However, 16 and 17 year-olds in care have not been given the same protection because the government believes their needs can be met in accommodation such as bedsits, flats, shared houses and hostels – where children receive a set number of hours of support a week but no day-to-day care or consistent supervision. When ministers made their decision over a third of children in care aged 16 and 17 – more than 6,000 at any one time – were living in this kind of accommodation. The Children’s Commissioner for England found that children were frequently living in these properties alongside adults who had recently left prison and/or were struggling with mental health difficulties or addiction.

We were refused permission for our case to be heard in the Court of Appeal, so have continued our fight against this dangerous, unjust change to the law through our #KeepCaringTo18 campaign.

First-tier tribunal finds that Ministry of Justice does not centrally hold information about why children have been inflicted with pain-inducing restraint techniques in prison (2020)

In December 2020, a First-tier Tribunal held that the Ministry of Justice had no duty under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act 2000 to provide Article 39 with the reasons for the 260 uses of pain-inducing restraint in child prisons in 2017/18 because this information is not held centrally – despite the department’s child safeguarding policy stating that a) central data collection takes place and b) the use of pain-inducing techniques on detained children is subject to more robust scrutiny than other forms of restraint.

The Ministry of Justice had informed the Information Commissioner that it would take 85 hours to collate the information requested by Article 39 – which far exceeded the time exemption allowed in the FOI legislation.

In the tribunal, counsel for the Ministry of Justice insisted that there was no breach of the safeguarding policy, with the tribunal observing that she “understandably declined to go into detail because she did not have instructions on the way in which the policy is being complied with” [29].

Article 39’s Director, representing the charity at the tribunal, explained the history of unlawful restraint in child prisons and the restraint-related deaths of two boys, Gareth Myatt (aged 15) and Adam Rickwood (aged 14), in 2004. The judge acknowledged in his decision that “the implementation of the [child safeguarding] policy to avoid future tragic incidents is at the core of the charity’s aims” [30]. Our work to ensure children in prison are protected from inhuman and degrading treatment in prisons continues.

Court of Appeal rules the Education Secretary acted unlawfully in failing to consult the Children’s Commissioner and other children’s rights organisations before removing children’s safeguards (2020)

In November 2020, the Court of Appeal unanimously declared that the Secretary of State for Education, Gavin Williamson, acted unlawfully in failing to consult the Children’s Commissioner for England and other children’s rights organisations before making “substantial and wide-ranging” [79] changes to legal protections for England’s 78,000 children in care (judgment here). Giving the leading judgment, Lord Justice Baker, with whom Lord Justice Henderson and Lord Justice Underhill agreed, found:

It was manifestly in the interests of the vulnerable children who would be most affected by the proposed amendments that those agencies and organisations representing the rights and interests of children in care should be consulted. [86]

Allowing the appeal, the judges granted a declaration “that the Secretary of State acted unlawfully by failing to consult the Children’s Commissioner and other bodies representing the rights of children in care before introducing the [legal changes]” [90].

In his judgment, Lord Justice Baker accepted the submission, made by Jenni Richards QC on behalf of Article 39, that the Department for Education had consulted “on an entirely one-sided basis and excluded those most directly affected by the changes”. Had children’s rights organisations “been included, the Secretary of State would have unquestionably been better informed about the impact of the proposed amendments on the vulnerable children most affected by them”[83], he added.

Article 39 launched the legal challenge after the government removed and watered down 65 safeguards for children in care in England, through The Adoption and Children (Coronavirus) (Amendment) Regulations 2020. Parliament was given no time to debate the changes; the Regulations were introduced on 23 April and came into force the very next day.

The safeguards lost or diluted by the Regulations included timescales for social worker visits to children in care, six-monthly reviews of children’s welfare, independent scrutiny of children’s homes and senior officer oversight of adoption decision-making for babies and children. The protections in place for disabled children having short breaks and children in care sent many miles away from home were also affected.

After starting to review children’s legislation in February, officials in the Department for Education, including the Chief Social Worker for Children and Families, had private email, telephone and face-to-face exchanges with a number of local authorities, adoption agencies, private providers and local government bodies during March and April.

The views of children and young people in care, or organisations representing their rights, views and interests, were not sought. The statutory body for children’s rights, the Children’s Commissioner for England, was informed of the changes to children’s legal protections in mid-April, after they had been signed off by Ministers.

Lord Justice Baker stated:

I can find nothing about the circumstances that existed in March 2020 to justify the Secretary of State’s decision (if indeed any conscious decision was made) to exclude the Children’s Commissioner and other bodies representing the rights of children in care from the consultation on which he embarked. He decided to undertake a rapid informal consultation, substantially by email. In the circumstances, it was plainly appropriate for the consultation to be conducted in that fashion, rather than a more formal, drawn-out process. But having decided to undertake the consultation, there was no good reason why that process should not have included the Children’s Commissioner and the other bodies. On the contrary, there were very good reasons why they should have been included. [85]

In the High Court, Mrs Justice Lieven had rejected the government’s characterisation (in written material) of these being “minor changes” and the simple removal of “bureaucratic burdens”. She said, “Regular visits to children, oversight by more senior officers over decision making and provision for independent scrutiny are critical safeguards to protect deeply vulnerable children in a field where errors happen with sad frequency and the consequences can be devastating”. However, it was Mrs Justice Lieven’s finding that the Education Secretary had not acted unlawfully in failing to consult organisations representing the rights, views and interests of children in care which Article 39 appealed. That has now been overturned by the Court of Appeal.

Lord Justice Baker said it was “potentially misleading” for the government to claim their actions were “broadly endorsed by the sector”, since “The “sector” plainly included not merely local authorities and service providers but also all those engaged or involved with children’s social care, including those bodies whose focus was on children’s rights” [85]. Further, “the fact that the Secretary of State was facing difficult decisions about whether and, if so, how to modify services made it important that he should receive as wide a range of advice as possible” [77].

Withdrawal of inaccurate Department for Education ‘myth-busting’ guide (2019)

In March 2019, the Department for Education withdrew a controversial document about council duties towards vulnerable children and young people, after Article 39 launched an application for judicial review.

The so-called ‘myth busting’ guide advised local authorities that they were legally permitted to reduce and remove support from children in long-term foster care, children who run away or go missing from home or care, children who are remanded to custody and young people who have left care and are still living with their former foster carers.

The then Children’s Minister Nadhim Zahawi claimed the document simply clarified council duties, but Article 39 and 49 other charities and social work experts warned in a joint letter (sent September 2018) that it contained numerous inaccuracies and risked vulnerable children and care leavers losing vital support. After this correspondence with the Minister failed to elicit any agreement to correct the errors, or even a meeting to discuss our collective concerns, Article 39 instructed lawyers to begin legal proceedings. This legal action led to the Department for Education withdrawing the document from circulation, and notifying local authorities of this fact. In a subsequent meeting with the Children’s Minister, Article 39 obtained an assurance that any plans to issue a similar document in future would follow a consultation process including children and young people who may be directly affected.

Local authorities’ duty of care towards children – our Supreme Court intervention (2018-19)

Article 39 and The Care Leavers’ Association obtained permission to intervene in CN v Poole, which was heard in the Supreme Court in July 2018.

We feared the wrong decision in this case could have prevented those who have experienced abuse in care and custodial settings from being able to seek legal redress and compensation.

We were delighted when, in June 2019, the Supreme Court restored the right of children and young people in certain circumstances to sue for negligence where a local authority has failed to protect them from harm (judgment here). The ruling clarified that local authorities can be held to have a duty of care when they are carrying out their statutory child protection functions in respect of children for whom they have not previously accepted responsibility (by virtue of a care order for example). This has very important and welcome implications for children living in a variety of institutional settings and for care leavers.

Escort companies no longer allowed to use pain-inducing restraint techniques on children (2017-20)

In August 2020, following our legal action, the Ministry of Justice confirmed that pain-inducing restraint had been removed from the core restraint syllabus for escort custody officers taking children to/from custody. The companies employing escort custody officers were instructed that these techniques must never be used when other approaches are possible. (In October 2019, the government announced GEOAmey and Serco had been contracted for 10 years to provide prisoner escort and custody services, which includes the escort of detained children).

Article 39 has always challenged pain-inducing restraint. The death of Adam Rickwood, aged just 14 years, after he was inflicted with the so-called ‘nose distraction’ in a Serco-run child prison in Durham, together with the testimony of other children, has been our driving force.

In 2016, we discovered that escort custody officers were being trained to inflict pain as a form of restraint on children during their journeys to/from secure children’s homes. This was despite such techniques being banned in the secure children’s homes themselves. After corresponding with the government, we saw that legal action would be the only way to protect children.

We raised funds through a CrowdJustice appeal and our legal team started challenging the policy in August 2017, after which the Ministry of Justice undertook an internal review – concluding that the policy would remain unchanged. We kept up the pressure, and were then told a full review of pain-inducing restraint would take place. Lack of progress led us to apply for permission for judicial review in October 2018. The High Court stayed (paused) our application in January 2019 while a review was carried out by Charlie Taylor (then Chair of the Youth Justice Board though undertaking the review in a personal capacity), and Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights completed an inquiry in child custody.

Charlie Taylor’s report was published in June 2020 and recommended that pain-inducing restraint be taken out of the main restraint syllabus, with techniques involving pain only ever being potentially available in very serious, emergency self-defence situations. The government accepted this recommendation – both in respect of children’s journeys to/from custody (our legal challenge) and child prisons generally.

But the government’s full written response gave no indication as to when children would be protected. In fact, it suggested there could be significant delay.

Further correspondence from our lawyers followed. The Ministry of Justice was told we were preparing to return to court. Then, in August 2020, more than four years after we started challenging the policy – and a day before the 16th anniversary of Adam Rickwood dying – we were told that pain-inducing techniques are no longer authorised as a form of restraint during children’s journeys to/from custody. We were also given a time-frame for their removal from child prisons.