Professor Helen Stalford LL.B (English and French law), Ph.D.

Helen Stalford is a leading expert in European Children's Rights and has worked on various projects with the Commission, the Fundamental Rights Agency, the Council of Europe and UNICEF. Most of her work is distinguished by its cross-national, child-rights based approach, including the direct participation of children and young people in evaluating the impact of European law on their lived experiences.
She has published numerous articles on European children's rights, children's citizenship, cross-border family breakdown, immigration, and children's access to justice in a European context. Her book, 'Children and the European Union: Rights, Welfare and Accountability' (Hart 2012), remains the leading authority on children's rights under EU law. Earlier books on this theme include (with Louise Ackers) 'A Community for Children?: Children, Citizenship and Migration in the EU' (Ashgate, 2004). She has also produced edited collections on issues of gender and migration, health and migration and on the EU's role in promoting children's rights globally.
Helen is a founding member of the UK-wide 'Brexit and Children' coalition, a collaboration between over 30 leading academics, practitioners and civil society organisations, which seeks to bring children's rights to bear on the Brexit process.

Much of Helen's work is concerned with facilitating children's access to and enforcement of their rights, and with monitoring the effects of the law on children's lives. In 2009-2010 she headed a team of international researchers to develop a set of children's rights indicators on behalf of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency. This is aimed at enabling the EU institutions to monitor the impact of EU law and policy on children in the future and it has informed European level research and monitoring on child trafficking, unaccompanied minors, child participation and child friendly justice. Helen was then commissioned (with Anne Crowley) to develop a self assessment tool on behalf of the Council of Europe to enable States to monitor and evaluate the implementation of the Council of Europe's Recommendation on the Participation of Children and Young People (2012-13). In 2014-15, she worked with the UK children's rights charity, Investing in Children, to develop a child friendly version of the Council of Europe's Child Friendly Justice Guidelines. This took as its starting point the views of children and young people who have had direct experience of different justice proceedings.
More recently, Helen has convened two international projects that seek to bring children's rights theory, principles and methods to bear on legal practice. The first project, Children's Rights Judgments (2015-17, co-led with Prof Kathryn Hollingsworth, University of Newcastle), was funded by the AHRC and involved nearly 60 children's rights experts from across the world in re-writing existing judgments from an explicitly children's rights perspective. The second project was a European Commission-funded partnership with Save the Children in Italy and Romania, as well as other children's rights organisations across Europe. This project involved working with legal practitioners and children on live cases to develop online training materials aimed at making the justice process more child friendly (TALE, 2015-2017). Helen is currently working with colleagues in the Liverpool Law Clinic to provide training to immigration practitioners, using the online tool as a framework for developing good practice.