DEFENCE FOR CHILDREN INTERNATIONAL (DCI) - Belgium | Practical Guide Depending on their mandate, civil society organisations can make an enormous contribution to ensuring that complaints mechanisms are known, accessible, effective and child-friendly and they may assist children in preparing their complaints. They may also have the right to file an internal complaint on behalf of a child or group of children provided they have their informed consent. Requests and/or complaints procedures do not have to be formally written to be effective. Another point to consider is whether staff or mentors are assigned for the specific purpose of responding to more informal verbal requests from children. Children should be able to communicate their complaint in their own language with the assistance of interpreters if required. Children should be able to inquire at any time about their complaint to the person in charge of handling it. C. SAFETY Children should have the right to confidentiality when filing a request and/or complaint and in the course of the complaint procedure, although this is often not observed in practice. It can be achieved through having a locked box for complaints to be placed in, situated in an accessible location that is not under constant supervision by staff or by CCTV systems, with clear provisions regarding who can open the boxes and when and with the confidentiality of protected correspondence (of mails and emails). Monitoring and/or complaint bodies should also develop strategies to collect request and/or complaints when they are visiting the facilities in such way that the child complaining cannot be identified by the other detained children and/or by the staff. There should be provision for requests and/or complaints to be filed anonymously. D. EFFECTIVENESS Each place depriving of liberty should have a set of internal policies and procedures for handling requests and/or complaints. In order for requests/complaints procedures to be meaningful and effective, any request and/or complaint should be dealt with without delay. For internal requests and/or complaints, the maximum length of the procedure should be set out in written guidance and children should be aware of the timeframe within which they can expect and ask for a response. 150