The law that allows judges to try 16- and 17-year-olds as adults should be removed. That is what the Child Protection Board stated on Wednesday in an appeal to politicians. According to the Council, a child who is tried as an adult does not get enough opportunity to develop healthy after a crime. “Children have the right to rehabilitation and recovery, as prescribed by international children’s rights,” says Mirjam Zeevaart, director at the Child Protection Board.
It is not known how many minors are tried as adults each year, according to the Ministry of Justice and Security. Out research Utrecht University shows that this option was used in 27 court decisions in 23 cases between 2016 and 2022. In these cases, young suspects were on trial for “very serious sex crimes, violent crimes or homicides,” the investigators write, such as house robberies with assault, human trafficking and (multiple) murder. For example, in 2016 a boy, who was 17 years old when he killed his mother, grandmother and sister, was tried as an adult. The judge imposed a ten-year prison sentence and ordered tbs with compulsory treatment.
Although the Council says it understands the need to punish minors suspected of a serious crime as harshly as possible, this could have an undesirable effect in the longer term. This is because normal criminal law focuses ‘less on rehabilitation and rehabilitation’, and more on retaliation. This increases the chance that a young person will commit a mistake again after release, the Council argues. That would not only be “harmful” to the child, but also to society.
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The Council states that it is an important ‘principle of our criminal law’ to distinguish between juvenile and adult suspects. Juvenile criminal law is structured in such a way that the development of children and young people is harmed as little as possible. The emphasis is on (re)education, learning from mistakes and reducing the risk of recidivism.
Criminal lawyer Noëlle Pieterse shares this view. “People always look at the length of a prison sentence and want convicts to stay in prison for a very long time. But that is not the basic principle of juvenile criminal law. Studies show that adolescent brains are still developing well into their mid-twenties,” she says. That means that she is “principally against the article of the law”.
Legal inequality
The Scientific Research and Documentation Center (WODC) published in June last year an investigation which shows that in practice judges and public prosecutors are usually able to handle the possibilities within the current juvenile justice system. For example, juvenile sanction law allows young serious offenders to be detained under intensive supervision for a maximum of seven years. In addition, it is possible to give the juvenile a maximum of two years of juvenile detention. The current juvenile punishment system also makes it possible to convert the imposed sentence into a TBS measure in due course. The research also shows that applying the law article or not can lead to legal inequality for young adults.
In legal practice, lawyer Pieterse also sees that judges are “open to requests to try 19 and 20-year-old suspects on the basis of juvenile criminal law. The adolescent criminal law, introduced in 2014, makes this possible. “Judges are very reluctant to impose adult criminal law on young people,” she says. The call from the Child Protection Board “fits in very nicely with” this system, says director of Maritime Transport.
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has been pushing for better protection of minors in Dutch criminal law for years. In February expressed concern about the possibility of judging older minors as adults.
This is the first time that the Council is arguing for the abolition of the derogation option. The organization, part of the Ministry of Justice and Security, advises the Public Prosecution Service and juvenile court judges about 10,000 times a year about punitive measures for underage offenders.
A version of this article also appeared in the October 19, 2022 newspaper
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