Rejecting House panel view, Ministry wants to try juveniles as adults

Rejecting the recommendation of a Parliamentary committee, the Ministry of Women and Child Development has sought Cabinet approval once again for its proposal to try juveniles aged between 16-18 years who commit heinous crimes under laws governing adults.

The proposal is expected to be taken up by the Cabinet in its meeting on Tuesday evening. “We have send the proposal to the Cabinet again. Given the changing patterns of crime, the provision to try 16-18-year-olds under IPC when they are accused of heinous crimes like murder, rape, etc., is the need of the hour,” said a senior ministry official.

“We have put safeguards in place. This will happen only after the Juvenile Justice Board, with the help of competent experts, has taken a call on what was going through the person’s mind when the crime was committed and whether the person deserved leniency,” the official added.

During the recent Budget session, the Parliamentary Standing Committee for human resources development, had a tabled a report that rejected any such provision in the proposed Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Bill, 2014.

The committee had also overturned another proposal by the ministry to try any juvenile who had turned 21 by the time the trial commenced as an adult. On this point though, the ministry appears to have revised its stand, as reflected in its revised note to the Cabinet.

The draft legislation specifies that no matter what the age of a person “when s/he stands for trial, if the crime was committed as a juvenile the person would be tried as one”.

Under the proposed law, the Juvenile Justice Board will examine whether any accused aged between 16-18 years had committed a heinous offence “in full knowledge” of its consequences. Its final recommendation will decide if the juvenile would be tried under regular criminal laws instead of the Juvenile Justice Act. Under the existing Act, the maximum punishment is confinement in a home upto a period of three years.

The Parliamentary panel had concluded, after deliberations with stakeholders including NGOs and study of data from the National Crime Records Bureau, that the “existing juvenile system is not only reformative and rehabilitative in nature but also recognises the fact that 16-18 years is an extremely sensitive and critical age requiring greater protection”. “Hence there is no need to subject them to different or adult judicial system…,” it said.

The demand for making changes in the Juvenile Justice Act gained momentum in the wake of the brutal Delhi gangrape case of December 2012 when one of the five perpetrators was six months short of adulthood and could not be tried as an adult.

Source:: Indian Express