Hong Kong, 4 August 2026 — The Hong Kong Centre for Human Rights (HKCHR) today published its submission to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), ahead of the pre-session review of Hong Kong’s compliance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The report documents a wide range of alleged violations affecting children and youth in Hong Kong since the Committee’s last review in 2013 — a 13-year gap the submission describes as an unprecedented deficit in accountability.

The submission covers nine thematic clusters, including:

1. Exclusion of civil society from the State reporting process, including a ban on in-person public deputations during the consultation on Hong Kong’s CRC report;
2. The 2019 protest movement’s impact on children, including the November 2019 siege of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where the trapping of numerous minors sparked desperate community rescue missions and prompted school principals to intervene, ultimately extracting roughly 300 underage individuals;
3. Criminalisation of frontline protectors, including social workers and grassroots peacekeepers who intervened to shield young people from police violence;
4. Abuse of child welfare law, alleging that Care or Protection Orders under the Protection of Children and Juveniles Ordinance were used by police to arbitrarily detain uncharged minors during the protest movements in 2014 and 2019, in one case for 27 days;
5. Conditions in juvenile penal facilities, citing testimony of physical abuse dating back to 2017, and criminal conviction of a correctional officer in 2026 for his serious assault on a young person on remand;
6. Mandatory “patriotic” education and ideological programming imposed on youth in custody and on thousands of uncharged protesters held in prolonged legal limbo;
7. A rising youth suicide rate — 187 recorded cases among primary and secondary students between 2019 and 2025 — alongside the National Security Police raid on Hunter Bookstore over a youth mental-health exhibition;
8. Restrictions on academic and cultural freedom, following concerns previously raised by other UN treaty bodies; and
9. Discriminatory school hairstyle rules, including ongoing discrimination claims brought by former students.

The submission sets out proposed questions for the Committee’s List of Issues and a set of recommendations, including calls to restore civic space, end the use of welfare orders and national security legislation against minors, establish independent oversight of juvenile detention facilities, and close outstanding cases against uncharged youth protesters.

“Thirteen years is too long for any government to go without independent scrutiny of how it treats children. This submission puts that record before the Committee and asks the State party to answer for it,” said a spokesperson for the Hong Kong Centre for Human Rights.

“Hong Kong’s children tried to be heard through peaceful, lawful means before anything else. This report is, in part, an account of what happens to a generation when a government refuses to listen, treating them as threats to be managed rather than rights-holders to be protected.”

The Committee will convene the pre-sessional working group 29 September – 2 October 2026, during which they will adopt a list of issues to guide the review that will take place in a few months. HKCHR is urging the Committee on the Rights of the Child to take up the issues raised in the submission during Hong Kong’s upcoming review and to incorporate the proposed questions into its List of Issues.

The full submission is available at https://tinyurl.com/HKCHR-CRC