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Abstract
The government's current review of child representation suggests the administrative amalgamation of the court welfare and guardian ad litem services, and seeks consultation on the extension of children's rights under section 64 of the Family Law Act 1996. It also aims, overall, for ‘efficiency savings', the implication being that work is currently being done and roles performed unnecessarily. In the light of these questions, this article constructs the current systems for implementing children's rights in family proceedings, in both the public and private law contexts, to analyse the overall mechanisms by which the legal process ensures the child's potentially conflicting rights both to representation as an individual with personal views and also to welfare, which is an all-pervading but not necessarily easily discoverable end.
The interaction between personal rights to representation and the overall right to welfare has not been resolved at the level of theory or in practice and the project of children's rights risks abdication. Given that there is considerable overlap between the public and private law processes at the factual level, the forms of the process should be considered together to construct a system which functions overall; all the more so, as the government proposes to amalgamate the very different services which currently operate in each process. The search for the most satisfactory mechanisms requires clear statements of both the aims of the process and of the difficulties of practice, whether they be cultural resistance to legal rights within the private family or a lack of resources to implement ideals of justice for the family.