Juvenile Criminal Law

• Author: Jaan Sootak
• Pages: 71-73

Jaan Sootak

Juvenile Criminal Law

At the beginning of the present century, the development of criminal law had, apropos, reached a point where the necessity to elaborate an independent juvenile criminal law had become obvious and understood. This was a field governed by the reform ideas of Franz von Liszt and the International Association of Criminology (Internationale Kriminalistische Vereinigung). Juvenile criminality would be no longer interpreted as a set of offences or as a part of general delinquency, but as a specific social problem which needed appropriate attention, using, first and foremost, social and educational measures¹. Since that time, two principle variants in the legislative solution for juvenile criminal law can be discussed.

Pursuant to the first variant, juvenile criminal law is regulated autonomously, as for example by the German Juvenile Court Act (Jugendgerichtsgesetz) of 1923². Retaining certain general elements of delict from the law of administrative penalties (Verwaltungsstrafrecht, later Ordnungswidrigkeitenrecht) and from criminal law as the grounds for liability, the Act introduced a new branch of criminal law with an absolutely independent system of sanctions and grounds for their application, as well as a separate procedure and law of execution.

For German criminal law, which originated from the principles of classic criminal law and consequently, from a theory of punishment based on the idea of restitution, this meant the formation of a fundamentally new criminal law based on the idea of reform and, therefore, on the relative theory of punishment. It is absolutely understandable that these two phenomena could not fit together to be regulated by a single criminal code.

According to the second variant, juvenile criminal law remained a part of the main general criminal law by either forming a separate chapter in the penal code as in Switzerland for example or being included in the separate provisions of the penal code as in Sweden. Either of these ways do not exclude the regulation of juvenile liability by additional laws.

Even this second variant does not deny the important peculiarities of juvenile criminal law and consequently, its independence as a branch of criminal law. For example, sections 82-99 of Chapter 4 (Book 1) of the Swiss Criminal Code of 1937 apply to juvenile criminal law and is considered an essentially separate branch of criminal law³.

In Sweden, the problem of juvenile criminal liability is generally resolved by the provisions of the Criminal Code (Brottsbalk) and those of the Procedure Code (Rättegångsbalk). There are also many special laws, the most important of which are the Young Offenders Act of 1964 (the 1994 version is currently in force) and the Juvenile Supervision Act of 1990⁴.

In Sweden, a prosecutor dealing with a juvenile criminal case may desist the charge and is empowered to impose a fine on the juvenile. If the prosecutor decides to prosecute and the case is committed to the court, the court will be entitled to choose any of the sanctions prescribed...