The rights of children and adolescents in Italy: An impact assessment of CRC Group's work from a regional perspective.

This research aims to question whether the presence of regional inequalities concerning the right to health and the right to pursue the highest attainable standard of health towards children and adolescents living in Italy can be regarded as a case of systemic discrimination. This study has the ultimate goal of framing this failure within an international framework, verifying whether, in accordance with the principles of international law, it can be defined as a serious violation of human rights. The inspiration for this work comes from the preliminary analysis of the monitoring Reports produced annually by the Italian NGO Group for the Convention on the Rights of the Child – Gruppo CRC, which has been working for years on the concept of discrimination in Italy and which first analyzed the issue of discrimination rooted on a regional basis towards children and adolescents. This work focuses mainly on the impact assessment of the reports and recommendations published by the CRC Group, confirming them as a multi-level governance tool. Along with the tools published by the CRC Group, reports and monitoring produced at the international level were analyzed, with the aim of linking the concept of systemic discrimination framed at the level of international law with the situation analyzed at the Italian level. This research focuses mainly on the inequalities present on a regional basis regarding the right to health and the right to pursue the highest attainable standard of health. The right to health is fundamental to the full enjoyment of other human rights, and the presence of discrimination in this field results in a serious violation of human rights. This study focuses mainly on inequalities toward children and adolescents living in Italy. This choice is driven by the awareness that the foundations for healthy living are laid mainly in the early years of life and the presence of regional disparities in access to health services will therefore result in some children and adolescents living in worse conditions than others, possibly condemning them to worse health conditions. The first chapter of this research focuses on analyzing how the concept of structural discrimination is recognized and defined within international law. Since the full enjoyment of the right to health is the basis for the full enjoyment of other human rights, the interdependent connection between these two principles will also be examined in this chapter. The aim is to delineate where the boundary beyond which a violation of human rights occurs within international law, with regard to the principle of non-discrimination in access to the fundamental right to health, specifically in relation to minors living in Italy. In addition, as the subject of this study are minors living in Italy, conventions that protect this group of people are also analyzed during this first chapter. The second chapter aims to collect multiple national and international publications which quote inequalities rooted on a regional basis present in Italy in access to health services for children, to concretize the complaint of a situation of structural discrimination in Italy that has the serious effect of reserving different, and very often worse, treatment for children and adolescents living in Italy, depending on the region of origin. The third chapter aims to demonstrate the presence of structural discrimination in access to certain health-related services against minors in Italy. To carry out this analysis, five health indicators were selected, and accurate data was collected region by region. The purpose is to provide a picture of the Italian situation, in relation to fundamental factors in the lives of minors in Italy, and to verify, through updated data, whether treatment appears to be homogeneous in all regions or the inequalities reported at the international level are supported and that therefore, the presence of structural discrimination can be confirmed.