Its last phase has been marked by the open war between Podemos and the PNV over an amendment on occupation, but the Justice Efficiency Law to which the plenary session of Congress gave the green light last Thursday after withdrawing those of Ione Belarra its threat to overthrow it, includes a very important measure for violence against girls, boys and adolescents: the creation of specialized courts in these cases in the style of what has happened with gender violence since 2005, a model that the Government plans to apply also to mistreatment of minors.
This is a provision contained in the child protection law that came into force in June 2021 and which mandated the Executive to present a bill within one year to launch these judicial bodies, whose owners will be trained specifically for these cases. The measure, agreed upon by the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Youth and Children, was presented a few months later, but the 2023 electoral call left it in the air until March of this year – almost two years after the set deadline and three years after the entry into force of the law. And about to end 2024 it has been approved in extremis with the opposition of the PP, which tried to veto it in the Senate.
The text specifies that “the reality of violence” against minors makes this adaptation of justice “urgent.” According to the latest data, in 2022 the ANAR Foundation carried out 17,896 services to children, of which almost 40% reported some type of violence, from physical or psychological abuse to bullying and abandonment. Furthermore, 43% of the victims of sexual assault reported in Spain are minors, according to the latest report of the Ministry of the Interior. Other recent study of the Mutua Madrileña Foundation points out that three out of every four minors have suffered some episode of sexual violence in the digital sphere.
Furthermore, the number of minors seeking help for gender violence has grown in recent years, as ANAR has also detected: both adolescent girls who suffer it firsthand and, above all, boys and girls who experience it in their homes. of their parents. Since 2013, 62 minors have been murdered for this reason, nine this year. In these cases, the new law specifies that the Violence against Women courts will have jurisdiction.
However, the new bodies will be inserted into the new judicial structure inaugurated by the law and whose main novelty is that it leaves behind the single-person courts to create the so-called Courts of Instance, of which there will be one per judicial district and will be made up of different sections. made up of one or more judges. This means that the current 3,800 courts will become 431 Courts. In them there will be sections of Civil and Instruction and the rest can be from any of the possible specialties, among them: Commercial, Criminal, Family, Minors (for cases in which the accused is one), Violence against Women , or now also, Violence against Children and Adolescents.
Specialization according to “workload”
The law fails to establish a minimum number of sections of the latter type that must exist in each Court of Instance, judicial district or province. And its creation will depend on the “workload” in each one. The sections may extend their jurisdiction to two or more parties in the same province and in those places where a specific section has not been created, one of the Investigative Judges will be in charge of processing cases of violence against boys, girls and adolescents, “either exclusively or also knowing about other subjects,” the norm details.
This is one of the issues that most concerns organizations in defense of children’s rights, which have celebrated the incorporation of specialized justice as “a fundamental step”, but regret that this is “optional” depending on the number of children. cases. “It is a very important advance and that is the first thing, but there is no number or concrete reference to how many have to be created, we will have to see how it is implemented so that there is no territorial inequality, but we believe that specialization should have been ensured in all the Courts of Instance and judicial levels,” says Carmela del Moral, head of childhood policies at Save the Children.
The Secretary of State for Justice, Manuel Olmedo, assumes that specialization is not going to reach everywhere, but points out that it is “a first step” in the face of a reality, that of violence against minors, “very invisible.” ” that needs to be judged “with a childhood perspective” and by legal operators “trained for it.”
The General Council of the Judiciary is the one that has a period of seven months to design the specialized training course while the Government and the communities with jurisdiction in justice will have to implement training for the psychosocial teams that advise the courts. “It is necessary that they understand how violence against children works and its specific characteristics, for example, that a minor ends up forgetting part of what happened as time passes or that sometimes they are not able to give details,” he adds.
“The next step is to do a workload study and from there establish what is needed. In medium and large judicial districts there will be specialized sections. In some, like Madrid or Barcelona, there will be several judges, in other medium-sized ones there will be one, and in small ones, the investigating judge will have powers and will see all types of cases,” explains Olmedo, who, given the lack of specific deadlines in the law to establish With the specialization underway, it plans to have the study by “the end” of 2025 because “the global organizational change” of the new standard “must be implemented first.”
For its part, the Ministry of Youth and Children highlights that this is “one of the most substantial advances in the development” of the child protection law because “it establishes a reform of the judicial system that, for the first time, adapts to its needs” and recognizes that “the main challenge is to get it started as soon as possible.” Regarding whether territorial inequality can be generated, the department directed by Sira Rego points out that its commitment is to create specialized sections “in all lower courts” or at least in all provinces, but admits that “there are objective criteria based on the workload.” Even so, he believes that specialization will be achieved “progressively” and gives as an example experiences such as the first specialized court in Spain, already created in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
The model of gender violence
This is a model that already works for sexist violence, in which whether a case is heard by a specialized judge depends on the victim’s zip code because they do not exist everywhere. 20 years after its launch, up to 14 provinces still do not have this type of bodies, which tend to be concentrated in large cities. Their creation is also “justified based on the workload,” the Government recently said, which means that today up to 36.3% of women do not have access to them despite the fact that they are more trained and judged. adapted for victims and who usually have more material and personal means.
The alternative that the Executive is giving in this situation is the so-called regionalization, which in practice implies that the specialized courts extend their scope of action and cover more territory, but it is an option that raises conflicting opinions. Olmedo maintains that “it is giving very good results” and that some negative effects, such as keeping victims away from the courts, can be counteracted with “the use of new technologies that allow them not to travel.” “We have previous experience of gender violence and, although it is not going to happen overnight because it is a process, this is going to help us with childhood,” says the Secretary of State.
As with violence against women, these courts – from now on, sections – will investigate cases and sentence minor crimes and when there is compliance. In addition, they may adopt precautionary measures and will be responsible for all crimes that involve violence, from homicide to injuries, crimes against freedom or privacy, torture or sexual crimes, among others. In this sense, there are also positions in the Criminal sections – which deal with cases when the sentence exceeds five years in prison – that will specialize, but, again, “according to the number of existing cases.”
Save the Children calls for “strengthening the model by ensuring specialization” and remembers that the courts “is one more step” along with other measures such as the generalization of pre-constituted evidence, that is, that the minor’s testimony be recorded to avoid that he must repeat his statement several more times, and the implementation of the Barnahus model, which aims to centralize the entire process in a single friendly space for children, preventing them from having to travel between police stations and courts. “The objective of all this is for justice to be more adapted to the needs of children and to prevent the judicial process from being what it has been until now, which, far from being restorative, often re-victimizes,” says Del Moral.
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