Nine is the new 15

One thing positive that has come out of the current debate on lowering the age of criminal liability is that it has exposed the inadequacies in the implementation of the current law that members of Congress seek to amend. Note that I did not write “inadequacies of the current law” but about the shortcomings in its implementation.

Last week, House Bill 8858 proposed to lower the age of criminal liability from 15 to nine. But due to strong opposition raised by children’s rights groups, the congressmen settled for lowering the criminal liability age to 12 instead.

This does not settle, however, the question about the basis for lowering the age in the first place. It appears that lawmakers are simply acting out of the often-expressed frustration of the president about criminal syndicates using children to commit crimes.

The law that congressmen seek to amend, Republic Act 9344 or the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act of 2006, otherwise known as the Pangilinan law, had long become a favorite whipping post for right-leaning anti-crime advocates. This prompted the other side to ask: Did the law authored by Senator Francis Pangilinan really produce a generation of child criminals?

The Department of Social Welfare and Development has stated that the number of cases of children in conflict with the law (CICL - the politically correct term, so to speak, for children “who commit crimes”) has gone down since the passage of RA 9344. Data from the Philippine National Police, on the other hand, show that juvenile crimes comprise only 1.72 percent of the total number of reported crimes, most of which are petty crimes.

When RA 9344 was passed in 2006, it was hailed by UNICEF as “a long-awaited milestone in the promotion of child rights in the country,” according to Vera Files. Then President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (now House Speaker) even certified the urgency of passing the law, describing it as a “paradigm shift in dealing with youth offenders accenting restorative justice.”

Sadly, the country proved ill-equipped in implementing the law. Most local government units lack either the funds or the political will, or both, to build local rehabilitation facilities for CICLs. As a result, erring children still end up in jail-like conditions. Only a few progressive politicians saw the need to build facilities for CICLs, empower social workers, support good parenting programs in slum communities, and support restorative justice programs for minor offenders – all of which were identified by UNICEF as requisites for a successfully functioning juvenile justice system.

On another point, House Bill 8858 attempts to make a distinction between “criminal responsibility” and “social responsibility” as it proposes to change the wording of that section of current law to “social responsibility”. The word change is meaningless, however, in the context how the law still essentially pegs the minimum age of possible discernment originally to nine, then to 12.

On what basis, asked my friend, child rights advocate Attorney Euvic Ferrer of the Commission on Human Rights. Euvic wrote on his Facebook page: “When RA 9344 was still a bill pending before Congress, the decision to peg the minimum age of criminal responsibility at 15 years old was based on a research study. According to the study, the average age of discernment of Filipino kids, or the average age when kids are able to discern what is right or wrong or what the consequences of their actions are, is 15 years old.”

As regards criminal syndicates who use children in their activities, I am no expert in children’s rights law but my friend Euvic is. He says that RA 7610, RA 9231, RA 10364, and RA 10630 – all four special laws passed in 1992, 2003, 2012, and 2013, respectively – seek to severely punish persons who use children to commit crimes or use children to commit unlawful work which, by its nature or the circumstances in which it is carried out, is likely to harm their health, safety or morals.

I have observed that Euvic has been very passionate and emotional about this issue – perhaps to a fault because the young lawyer’s blood pressure abnormally rose the other day prompting him to briefly seek emergency treatment at a hospital.

But I think the more emotional ones are in Congress and in Malacañang who, gnashing their teeth, proclaim that Pangilinan’s law is being too soft on children; they who think that erring children should be dealt with using the iron hand of the already dysfunctional agencies of the state.