PARENTS and young people attending children's hearings are being denied key rights, one of the system's former champions has claimed.

John Anderson, who was deputy chairman of Glasgow Children's Panel for five years and who has been a panel member for 20 years, has written to children's minister Aileen Campbell asking for a judicial review of the way new laws are being implemented.

Mr Anderson's complaint relates to the children's hearing system, under which children's panels discuss the needs and deeds of young people at risk or in trouble. A panel of three volunteers takes legally-binding decisions in discussions with others involved in the child's life, such as parents, social workers and teachers.

Some are identified formally as relevant persons, always including parents and perhaps grandparents or foster carers, giving them legal rights to attend meetings and receive documents about the child.

Under new laws, Pre-Hearing Panels (PHPs) can be held to decide whether a given person has enough significant involvement with a child to be called a Relevant Person.

The law states such decisions can be appealed - such as a parent objecting to someone else being declared relevant, or a carer, such as a grandparent, objecting to being denied relevant person status.

However, Mr Anderson says such meetings have routinely been held in Glasgow just 15 minutes before a panel goes on to consider the child's case, so denying participants, including the child, the opportunity to appeal decisions.

In his letter to the minister, Mr Anderson also raises a number of other concerns about practice under the new Children's Hearings (Scotland) Act 2011, alleging panels are routinely influenced and even coerced by reporters, the officials who call children to hearings, and by social workers when making their decisions.

Mr Anderson said he had been told by the Scottish Children's Reporter Administration (SCRA) that arrangements for PHPs were not illegal, but he was not satisfied with this. "There is a clear appeal process. Anyone deemed relevant or not relevant has a full seven days to appeal that."

Panel members had been told it was reasonable to go ahead with a hearing if nobody was going to appeal a pre-hearing decision, but participants should have the opportunity to go away and think about it, he said, while some people not present might also have the right to appeal, he argues.

In his letter, Mr Anderson says: "In the past year I believe panel members in Glasgow have broken parents and children's (European) convention rights (not that it was their fault). In every hearing where a relevant person was denied the right to appeal a decision to name another person relevant or to remove relevant person status the right to a fair trial was subsequently denied."

His letter concludes by asking Ms Campbell to suspend the system entirely until his concerns can be addressed.

A spokesman for SCRA said it was permissible to hold pre-hearings before a children's hearing where it was impractical to avoid it. However, he said it had been policy to encourage this only while the new act was bedding in. "The practice is no longer in force," he said. "Rights of appeal over any decision made still exist regardless of whether the decision has been made by a pre-hearing panel or by a children's hearing."

Morag Driscoll, director of the Scottish Child Law Centre, said there were times when PHPs had to be held at the same session as the full hearing. "It is all about the child. You can't put decisions on hold while you are deciding these issues. There isn't always time," she said.

A Scottish Government spokesman said: "We will consider the concerns Mr Anderson has raised and respond to him directly."