Working with communities to scrutinise government spending - human rights budgeting

Podcasts By The Scottish Parliament

The Scottish Parliament

Government

4.8 • 25 Ratings

🗓️ 24 November 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

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Summary

“We were given a space… and in there we were allowed to develop a voice.” We chat with Afam and Justine from Commission Advocating Rights for Minorities (CARM). CARM worked with the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee to test what a truly participatory approach to human rights budgeting could look like. Their lived experience shaped the scrutiny process, influenced MSPs directly, and helped reframe how the Committee thinks about voice and accountability. Members of CARM worked with the Committee exploring participation and accountability in Scotland’s budget. They composed questions for Ministers, co-designed scrutiny themes, and helped MSPs hear lived experience in people’s own words. In this episode, Afam and Justine explain what that work involved, why the experience mattered, and how the framework they helped shape is now influencing organisations beyond Holyrood.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Tom from the Scottish Parliament's comms team, and today I'm going to find out about
0:04.2	human rights budgeting. We're going to learn about what that means and the difference that
0:08.4	taking this approach can make to the Scottish budget. The Equality's Human Rights and Civil Justice
0:13.2	Committee has been considering how the Scottish Government takes account of human rights in its
0:16.8	budget process. Today, I'm joined by Elsa, a senior researcher from the Scottish Parliament
0:21.4	Information Centre, which you may also know as Spice. And I'm also joined by Afam and Justin, who are from
0:26.5	Calm, the Commission Advocating Rights for Minorities. Calm have been helping the committee with its work
0:32.1	on human rights budgeting. Elsa, Afam and Justin, welcome to the podcast. Hi.
0:38.1	Thank you.
0:39.1	Thank you so much.
0:43.9	Elsa, some of our listeners will be aware that the Scottish government has had some big plans for human rights this session, but they haven't all quite panned out.
0:46.9	Would you be able to tell us about what the government has delivered on and where things
0:49.6	have quite gone to plan?
0:51.0	Yeah, it's been a bit of a mixed bag over the past few years. So I would say that
0:55.9	this session, the government's really come out of the gates with a new narrative and really
1:01.7	bringing human rights to the foreground of what it wants to do. So we've seen some changes
1:08.1	in the way that it's referred to equalities by adding human rights in there.
1:13.6	So it's definitely been something which has been on the government's mind a lot more.
1:17.8	And it had a real win at the end of 2023 when legislation was passed on the incorporating the UN rights of the child into Scottish law, which basically meant that from 2024 onwards,
1:30.3	all public bodies had a duty towards children. And it basically gives children and young people a much stronger voice in public life in Scotland and in the courts in Scotland. So that's been really, really positive. One of the things that the government had set out to do this session was to introduce legislation which brought the UN conventions into
1:52.1	Scottish law, because right now they don't sit separately in Scottish law. They're in UK law.
1:57.4	And that hasn't come to pass yet.
	...

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