With 300,000 children reportedly living without homes or parental supervision in Algeria's cities, authorities are drafting laws to better resolve legal conflicts involving minors.
Algeria is developing legislation that would shift the focus of the juvenile justice system from prosecution to protection, particularly by exempting children under 10 from criminal charges.
"The Ministry of Justice will soon refer the draft law on child protection to the government," the head of the Ministry of Justice's section for juvenile justice, Judge Meriem Charfi, told participants in a December 12th-15th course for judges and directors of youth rehabilitation institutes.
The new law sets the age of criminal responsibility for children at 10 years, the judge said at the event, in which over 26 judges took part. She added that current laws "don't include a minimum age" in that regard.
Juvenile delinquency is a persistent concern in Algeria, where the National Gendarmerie last February reported having dismantled 413 gangs led by children under 17. The security force also said that 300,000 homeless children under the age of 18 were living without parental care or supervision in major cities. The director of the judicial police, Khaira Massoudan, told course participants that 9,000 minors allegedly broke the law in the last 10 months alone.
The new legislation "aims at moving childhood from the criminal judicial system to a reform-oriented educational system" by protecting and re-socialising children, the director general of the Prison Department, Moukhtar Flion, told participants in the course.
"All the provisions on children have been collected in this new legislation," said Flion, adding that the law would also create a national council for the "protection of childhood" that would draw up a national strategy for achieving this goal.
Charfi said the new draft law "insists on social protection of children before resorting to judicial protection" and "allows resorting to mediation for children's simple misdemeanors and violations [of the law]".
In addition, the law would permit juveniles to forgo having to personally appear in court, strengthen the follow-up on delinquents at the stages between initial investigations and trial, reduce time on remand and involve children in all measures regarding their cases.
The impetus for drafting a new law came from "societal developments and the resulting new needs of children, especially delinquent children who live in horrible conditions", the secretary general of the Ministry of Justice, Massoud Bou Farsha, said at the course.
"The law includes the most important rights that children must enjoy, and stipulates the involvement of children in all measures, procedures and decisions taken regarding them," he added.
Judge Sakhri Mbarka said a major legal vacuum exists in terms of delinquency prevention and child protection.
"The 'phenomenon' of making children appear before courts is due to the legal vacuum and the lack of preventive legal measures and procedures that prevent children's crimes and delinquency," said the judge, adding that prevention was the "only way" to protect children from going astray.
The director of programmes for Penal Reform International (PRI), Khloud Nejim, called its partnership with the ministry "effective" and praised its role in capacity-building and training juvenile justice personnel.
A PRI-supervised juvenile justice programme in Algeria will hold two specialised training workshops targeting personnel at youth correctional facilities and social workers working on children's cases. The programme also aims at establishing a model rehabilitation center in Algiers.
By Walid Ramzi from Algiers for Magharebia
© Magharebia.com 2009
