AN ASSESSMENT OF ROUTINE DATA COLLECTION GAPS IN THE JUSTICE FOR CHILDREN SECTOR
IN SRI LANKA AND RECOMMENDATIONS ON IMPROVING SYSTEMS AND ADDRESSING DATA GAPS
Highlights
This report presents findings of an assessment of routine data collection gaps in the Justice for Children Sector in Sri Lanka.
The recording of children’s encounters with the justice system by authorities and service providers is essential in order to understand the profile and circumstances of children who come into contact with the justice system, whether in conflict with the law, as victims or witnesses or in need of care and protection. It is also necessary for monitoring and evaluating the performance of the child justice system.
High-quality and reliable data on the youth justice and child protection systems enables evidencebased policy development and implementation. It is also vital to the development of governance and regulatory structures and procedures; human resources development; identification of education and training needs; improved service delivery and financing; the ability to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the system, as well as being a valuable research tool.
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in its concluding observations to Sri Lanka’s 5th and 6th periodic report recommended that the government establish a comprehensive data collection system to assess the progress achieved in realising children’s rights and to help design policies and programmes to implement the CRC.1 Bearing in mind this recommendation, the purpose of this assessment is a) to contribute to the development of an integrated and coordinated child protection / justice for children information management system, and b) to inform the monitoring2 of policies and programmes to realise children’s rights. The assessment is divided into two parts to meet the objectives: first, the availability of juvenile justice indicators, and second, the maturity of the juvenile justice data management processes.
Juvenile Justice Indicators:
The ability of an administrative system to produce data on a core set of data indicators provides important insights into the strength of that system. In order to monitor how well the justice system functions, the UNICEF 2021 publication, “Achieving Justice for Children” has developed ‘proposed minimum indicators’ on justice for children.3 These indicators cover key data points needed to monitor children in conflict with the law, diversion and sentencing measures, crimes against children and children in detention, including administrative detention.
Juvenile Justice Data Management Processes:
The monitoring of children’s access to justice through the monitoring of key juvenile justice data indicators is only possible if adequate, efficient data management processes are in place. UNICEF has developed a toolkit for Assessing Administrative Data Systems on Justice for Children,4 which sets out nine elements of a mature data management system (the legal and normative framework; governance and planning; data infrastructure; coordination of data; completeness of data; effective and secure data transmission; standardized data and practices; administrative data quality assurance, and data use, demand and dissemination).
