"This is a change that radically affects the very foundation of juvenile justice." This is the statement issued by the executive board of the Union of Criminal Chambers regarding the bill on the criminal liability of minors. "The text of the bill adds a further piece to the repressive strategy adopted towards minors, which began with the Caivano decree and continued, most recently, with the proposed extension of preventive detention to minors as well," the statement emphasises. "In this context, the so-called 'anti-maranza crackdown', in addition to raising serious doubts about its constitutional compatibility, appears to be a symptom of a worrying cultural regression."
"This is a change that radically affects the very foundation of juvenile justice, historically built on the awareness that adolescence is a phase characterised by a personality still in development and an incomplete process of maturation," underlines the executive board of the Union of Criminal Chambers, adding that "for this reason, the penal code of 1930 and even more so the system outlined by the juvenile criminal procedure of 1988, require a concrete assessment of the minor's maturity and their actual capacity to understand the meaning of their actions."
For criminal lawyers, "a mature liberal-democratic order should be capable of abandoning the security illusions and emotional impulses that often accompany public debate on juvenile deviance, in order to recover the clarity of choices consistent with constitutional principles and grounded in science and empirical data." "The bill," the statement reads, "risks becoming the first step in a path already evoked in public debate: one aimed at the progressive lowering of the age of criminal responsibility." For the Union of Criminal Chambers, "the true test of a State's maturity does not lie in treating minors as adults, but in being able to recognise that they are not, developing intervention strategies that are not merely the expression of a muscular and illusory display of institutional intransigence at 'zero cost'."
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