Lawmakers against youth II
Lower House approves proposal to reduce age of criminal responsibility in second round
The Lower House of Congress approved yesterday, August 19, by 320 votes (it needed 308), the amendment to Constitutional Amendment 171/1993 that reduces the age of criminal responsibility from 18 to 16. The proposal will now proceed to the Senate. The amendment passed in the first round in early July following a procedural maneuver by the president of the house, Congressman Eduardo Cunha, to revive the proposal less than 24 hours after it had been rejected.
“These 320 members of Congress are the henchmen in one of the most serious attacks against Brazilian youth,” said Vivian Calderoni, a lawyer for the Justice program at Conectas. “They used, throughout the entire passage of the proposal, fallacious arguments claiming that imprisoning more people and at a younger age will have an impact on crime. This claim is definitely not supported by the facts. And even more serious, it runs counter to all the international recommendations on the topic. Yesterday, the lawmakers took Brazil in the opposite direction to the rest of the world.”
Click here to read the myths and truths behind the proposal to lower the age of criminal responsibility.
The approved amendment establishes that adolescents older than 16 will be tried as adults only when they are involved in “heinous crimes” (as defined by Brazilian law), premeditated murder and bodily injury. Young people who commit these crimes currently total nearly 14% of all those in juvenile detention centers in the country, according to data from the Brazilian Public Security Forum. The text also provides for special facilities to be built to cater to this group of people.
Watch the interview with Vivian Calderoni, a lawyer for the Justice program at Conectas:
Today, children and adolescents older than 12 can already be held accountable and detained for up to three years. Data from the Brazilian Public Security Forum reveal that there were 20,532 detained adolescents in Brazil in 2012. More than half (51%), according to figures from Ipea (Applied Economic Research Institute) released in June, were not attending school or working when they committed the crime. And nearly 66% of them were from extremely poor families.
“If they were genuinely committed to reducing violence, the members of Congress would not be concerned with criminalizing black youth from the poor urban outskirts, but instead the exact opposite, approving measures to protect them since these young people are the main victims of violence,” added Calderoni.
Longer sentences
The lawyer pointed out that the Lower House must also vote on a bill approved hastily by the Senate on July 14 that increases the maximum sentence in the youth detention system from three to ten years. Negotiated between the government and the opposition, the proposal was presented as a supposedly milder alternative to the bill to lower the age of responsibility.
“We weren’t fooled: lengthening sentences is just as harmful as lowering the age of criminal responsibility. If this trivialization continues in the Lower House, we run the risk of witnessing a twin setback in the defense of childhood and youth,” she said.
