RICERCA ITALIANA     

Towards a european charter for the accused and convicted juvenile

Università degli Studi di Macerata

Abstract

The purpose of the research is to describe the essential features of european minimal rules on accused and convicted juvenile. There is the need, actually, to estabilish common fundamental warranties in order to ensure the same level of juridical civilty, in this particular area of judicial systems, within the borders of E.U. Doing so is necessary, also to implement to principle of mutual trust and recognizing of decisions, between member States. Collecting information, first, about national systems of juvenile justice, then about international right on this issue, the research will analyze and confront rules and provisions. Data will be studied in order to estabilish the real similarities and differences between national legislations and between these ones and international standards. It will be possible, afterwards, to verify if european rules are sufficient and technically adequate to grant a common european protection of rights to which juvenile defendants and convicted minors are entitled. If not, the aim of this study is to elaborate new rules or modify the old ones, so to draft a charter of minimal rules for juveniles involved in criminal procedures and sanctions. There are already european and international charters that put very serious and advanced landmarks on this issue. Nevertheless, they are often imprecise and generical. For example, they seem to adopt the "responsability model", but they do not always make clear and coherent choices about rights and >>>

Principal Investigator

Glauco GIOSTRA Università degli Studi di MACERATA

Research Objectives

The research's goal is somehow ambitious: presenting to the proper national and European institutions a comprehensive project that can be the basis for a discussion whose final aim is to draft a proposal for a framework decision in the field of juvenile justice. Furthermore, our purpose is also to offer to national legislative institutions an analysis and some proposals to implement the Framework Decision of the E.U. Council (March 2001) on "The standing of victims in criminal proceedings", requiring each member State to promote mediation practices in penal matters within the deadline of March 2006. This could hopefully pave the way to the introduction of a specific legislation on mediation in penal matters in our system. An interesting intermediate goal, essential to reach the final one, will be the analysis of all criminal justice systems for juveniles in E.U. countries and the publication, in english, of the results of this part of the research.

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

There is a very relevant political and cultural meaning in the renewed attention paid to the juvenile criminal justice system at the supranational level since a while: i.e. the awareness of the fact that juvenile criminal justice represents one of the basic subjects through which it is possible to measure the reasons for a political communion among different European countries, characterized by different traditions and different institutional background (in line with art. 1 of United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice, adopted by General Assembly Resolution 40/33 of 29 November, 1985, which provides «juvenile justice shall be conceived as an integral part of the national development process of each country, within a comprehensive framework of social justice for all juvenile, thus, at the same time, contributing to the protection of the young and the maintenance of a peaceful order in society »). Among the centripetal forces able to aggregate different social and political realities, there should be an eadem sentire related to the juvenile defendant's fundamental rights and the punitive and rehabilitative answers for the juvenile convicted. This doesn't mean that, even in the not recent past, there was a lack of International Charters containing provisions related to this matter, within declarations of fundamental human rights. Anyway the States were free to subscribe and to conform their legislation to the mentioned provisions, thus >>>