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Children in Court

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Latest news and cases

Children in criminal proceedings in India, Europe, Chile and the United Kingdom

In India, the Ministry of Women and Child Development has proposed to repeal and re-enact the Juvenile Justice Act, releasing a draft bill that would give the Juvenile Justice Board discretion to transfer children to adult courts. Under clauses 14 and 17(3) of the draft bill, children aged 16 to 18 who are alleged or found to have committed offences punishable with more than seven years’ imprisonment can be transferred to the adult system. This could potentially contradict the judgment by the Supreme Court in March this year which upheld the constitutionality of the Juvenile Justice Act and rejected a petition that called for an interpretation of the law to allow juveniles to be treated as adults. The Ministry is inviting suggestions and comments on the draft bill to be submitted by 3 July 2014. The draft bill and further details on making a submission are available through the MInistry's website.

Justice Ministers from the EU Member States have agreed on a general approach for measures that will guarantee special safeguards for children during criminal court proceedings. Every year in the EU, over a million children face criminal justice proceedings, representing 12 per cent of the total European population facing criminal justice. The agreement coincides with the European Commission’s release of a new study on children's involvement in criminal proceedings in the EU. Download the EU summary report and country-specific reports for each EU Member State.

Chile’s Supreme Court has approved the implementation and use of special rooms for child victims and witnesses who are required to give evidence in criminal proceedings. The special rooms, which will be adjacent to the courtrooms, will have two cameras to record the testimony of children and broadcast it live to a monitor at the hearing. A statement on the Court’s website says that this measure seeks to "protect the best interest[s] of the child, their privacy, their right to be heard and their dignity," and adds that "although it is desirable to exclude child victims and witnesses from criminal trials, especially infants, the bottom line is to prevent them being affected if their cooperation is indispensable under the current legislation". The measure follows a pilot that had been running within the Second Tribunal of Criminal Oral Proceedings in Santiago since January 2013.

In the United Kingdom, research suggests that giving evidence in court is causing thousands of child victims of sexual abuse to feel depressed, frightened and potentially suicidal. According to the research by NSPCC, 99 per cent of the 20,000 plus children who give evidence every year in England still have to do so from a court building as a result of the lack of video link sites available, despite recommendations that children should only be required to give evidence in a courtroom if they wished to.

This research comes as an independent parliamentary inquiry published its report on the effectiveness of the Youth Court in England and Wales. The report was critical of a lack of specialist professionals in the youth justice system and called for all people under 18 to be dealt with in the Youth Court by legal practitioners accredited to work with children. Picking up on an issue that national courts have recently struggled with, the report calls for new legislation to ensure lifelong anonymity for children involved in the youth justice system. In April this year, the High Court ruled that current anonymity orders expire when a child reaches 18.

Child offenders in Iran and the Maldives face the death penalty

A woman is at imminent risk of execution in Iran for an offence committed while she was 17 years old. The woman admitted to shooting her husband while he was asleep, reportedly after years of physical and verbal abuse. Speaking for Human Rights Watch, Joe Stork said of the case “[e]very time an Iranian judge issues a death sentence for a child offender … he should remember he is flagrantly violating his legal responsibilities to administer justice fairly and equitably.” Iran has executed at least 10 child offenders since 2009, making it the country that executes the highest number of child offenders. In early 2013, Iran passed a new Islamic Penal Code which purports to place limits on the sentencing of children, but the death penalty remains legal for hodud and qesas offences and has continued to be imposed on child offenders. You can read more about the death penalty in CRIN’s most recent submission to the Human Rights Council on inhuman sentencing of children in the country.

A 16-year-old teenager in the Maldives who is accused of murder could become the first person under the age of 18 to face the death penalty since the country reintroduced the sentence. The boy is accused of a fatal stabbing allegedly committed in December last year. Two children - one aged 16 and the other 14 - are also being held in custody in connection with the stabbing.

Under the recently-approved Penal Code, which effectively ends a 60-year moratorium on the use of capital punishment, children as young as seven can be held criminally responsible for capital offences, which include murder, apostasy and adultery. In practice, minors convicted of intentional murder could be executed once they turn 18. The changes to the law have sparked widespread condemnation, with the UN reminding the Maldives that international law bans the use of the death sentence against persons below the age of 18 at the time when the offence was committed, and urging the Government to retain its moratorium on the death penalty in all circumstances. A local human rights activist lamented that "[there is] no space for constructive debates on the death penalty in Maldives. To speak of the issue is labelled 'anti-Islam' because religion is politicised."

Right to education in Romania and the United States

This month, a Romanian court ruled that evictions of Romani people violated children’s right to education. The case concerned approximately 110 Romani people who were evicted from a building and relocated by the Tulcea municipality to the abandoned buildings of a former military garrison, well outside the city. The Constanţa Court of Appeal in southern Romania found that the authorities’ “failure to facilitate access to education for the plaintiffs by taking appropriate measures, including by providing easy access by public transportation to schools which are located a considerable distance from plaintiffs’ homes, constitutes an illegal act causing injury”. The Court also found the municipality liable for the moral damage suffered by the Romani people who were forced to live in overcrowded and unhealthy living conditions, which affected “their human dignity and right to respect for their private life and housing”.

In the United States, a California judge ruled that teacher tenure laws deprived students of their right to education under the State Constitution. The case, known as Vergara v. California, was brought by a group of nine students who argued that state tenure laws, which leave “grossly ineffective teachers” in place, “violate their fundamental rights to equality of education by adversely affecting the quality of the education they are afforded by the state”. Judge Treu of the Los Angeles Superior Court agreed with the students, ruling that the laws “disproportionately affect poor and/or minority students” and therefore violated their constitutional right to an equal education. The ruling is believed to be the first legal opinion in the United States to assert that the quality of an education is as important as mere access to schools or sufficient funding. According to the organisation Students Matter, which helped the students bring the case to court, the “historic decision… reaffirmed the fundamental, constitutional right of every student to learn from effective teachers and have an equal opportunity to succeed in school”. The ruling has also attracted criticism, with the California Federation of Teachers describing it as “fundamentally anti-public education, scapegoating teachers for problems originating in underfunding, poverty, and economic inequality.” The existing laws will remain in place pending appeals.

Another case on the right to equal access to education in California was filed in May, alleging that students in seven schools receive far less meaningful learning time than their peers in most California public schools amounting to a violation of the State Constitution. The class action, which was brought by the ACLU and Public Counsel, claims that thousands of students miss out on days, weeks and even months of classroom instruction because of high teacher turnover, frequent interruption of class by violence or security issues, and a severe lack of resources.

International Criminal Court makes progress in the CAR and DRC

In June, the President of the Central African Republic referred the situation in the country to the International Criminal Court (ICC). Among the alleged crimes committed since August 2012 are killings, rape, torture, sexual enslavement and the recruitment of children to be used as soldiers. During the last month alone, the UN Refugee Agency reported that 30 children had been killed fleeing the violence. The ICC opened a preliminary examination of the State in February this year to ascertain whether to open a full investigation into potential war crimes committed, but this referral by the CAR’s authorities may enable the process to be expedited. Welcoming the referral, ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said, “Murder, rape, acts of pillaging, forced displacements, and other mass crimes committed in the Central African Republic since 2012 must immediately stop. Everyone should know that these acts have been duly documented by my Office, and will not go unpunished.”

The ICC has also made progress on cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) over the last month, including by confirming charges against Bosco Ntaganda. The charges consist of 18 counts of war crimes, including murder, sexual slavery, enlisting and conscripting children under the age of 15 to be soldiers and crimes against humanity. The court reviewed 69,000 pages of evidence during the hearings that took place in February before confirming the charges this month. Ntaganda became the first wanted person to voluntarily surrender himself to the ICC when he surrendered to the United States embassy in Rwanda in March 2013.

Meanwhile, the trial of Germain Katanga came to an end in May as the ICC sentenced him to 12 years imprisonment for aiding and abetting war crimes in the DRC. Though originally charged with being directly involved in the crimes, the court found, in March this year, that Katanga had acted as an intermediary between weapons suppliers and those who physically targeted the village of Bogoro in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2003. Katanga was acquitted of further charges of using child soldiers, as although the court was convinced beyond reasonable doubt that children were within the Ngiti militia that carried out the attack, there was not enough evidence to establish his responsibility for this crime.

FGM prosecutions in Spain, Kenya and Australia

There have been several prosecutions for female genital mutilation (FGM) over the past month. In Spain, the Supreme Court of Barcelona confirmed the 12 year prison sentences imposed on a Gambian couple for the mutilation of their two daughters, both minors. The court rejected the appeal of the couple, who argued that they were not involved in the FGM, finding that the couple had given their full blessing and were aware of the acts. The court stated that “clitoridectomy is not culture, it is mutilation and discrimination against women”.

In Kenya, a Masai couple were charged with the murder of a 13-year-old girl in their care who bled to death after she was subjected to FGM in a remote homestead in Kajiado county, south of Nairobi. The case is being prosecuted by the Kenyan office of the director of public prosecutions’ anti-FGM unit, which was established in April this year and is deploying teams across the country in an attempt to prosecute more cases. According to a 2009 survey, 73% of women in Kenya's Masai ethnic community have been subjected to FGM, and 27% of women across the country have been cut, despite the practice being outlawed in 2001.

In Australia, prosecutions of three people charged with FGM are moving ahead, with a mother, a retired nurse and a sheikh standing trial for performing FGM on two girls, aged six and seven. Nine people were originally charged with their involvement in the alleged acts, including the girls’ father, a doctor, whose charges were later dropped.

Inquiries and criminal proceedings on child abuse in Mexico and Ireland

Mexico’s Roman Catholic Church has for the first time filed a criminal complaint against a priest who is accused of sexual abusing a 16-year-old boy. The case marks a departure from the Church’s long-held resistance to reporting abuse cases to civil authorities in the country. The Archdiocese of San Luis Potosi in central Mexico has also offered to cooperate with the state attorney general's office in the investigation of the abuse claims. The Citizens' Initiative Association, a Mexican child abuse victims' support group, says it has received complaints that dozens of other youths were abused by the priest in this case, and that the Church had been informed in the past.

Last month the UN Committee against Torture criticised the Holy See for its failure to prevent torture or ill-treatment of child victims of sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic clergy around the world.

Ireland’s government has launched a statutory inquiry into abuse of children in state-funded Catholic children’s homes. The announcement follows the furore over an alleged mass grave on the site of a home run by the Sisters of Bon Secours in Tuam. A local historian has claimed that the site is the location of a grave containing the bodies of up to 796 children who died between 1925 and 1961. The inquiry is set to examine the high mortality rate across the period as well as burial practices, alleged illegal adoptions and alleged vaccine trials on young children. The Irish Children's Minister, Charlie Flanagan, has said that the Tuam site should not be looked at in isolation. As many as 35,0000 unmarried mothers spent time in the ten homes religious institutions in Ireland. Four advocacy groups have launched a joint statement calling for the inquiry to be carried out by an independent commission including at least one international expert.

Brazil bans all forms of corporal punishment

This month, lawmakers in Brazil approved a law fully banning all forms of corporal punishment against children. Brazil is the 38th State in the world to adopt national legislation to ban physical punishment of children in all settings, including the home. A further 46 states have officially expressed a commitment to enacting prohibiting legislation. However, 155 states have yet to prohibit corporal punishment in all settings, and 39 retain physical punishment as a criminal sentence. Read a report by the Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children documenting the progress worldwide towards prohibiting all corporal punishment.

New law criminalises forced marriage in England and Wales

Under a new law in England and Wales, parents who force their children to marry can be punished by up to seven years in prison. The criminal provision - under the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 - will apply if people are forced into marriage in England and Wales, as well as to UK nationals at risk of being forced into marriage abroad. As well as outlawing forced marriage, breaching a civil Forced Marriage Protection Order will be punishable by five years in prison. The new law will be introduced in Scotland at a later date after Members of Parliament voted for legislation in January.

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