Gordon wants 12-yr-olds held criminally liable

AGE MATTERS Members of a children’s rights group protest the lowering of the minimum age of criminal liability outside the Senate gates on Thursday in Pasay City. —LYN RILLON

Not even his own admission that poor law enforcement was to blame for the state’s failure to curb crimes by juveniles could stop Sen. Richard Gordon from supporrting President Duterte’s proposal to lower the age of criminal liability.

On Friday, Gordon insisted that he would still recommend bringing down from 15 to 12 years old the minimum age for criminal responsibility despite the lack of any empirical evidence to justify it.

The President and administration lawmakers in the House of Representatives initially wanted to make it 9 years old, but they raised that to 12 after the proposal met strong opposition from human rights defenders.

Duterte said he was “comfortable” with 12.

Asked how the President’s position on the issue could influence the Senate’s decision, Gordon said: “Strong. He’s the President. He’s the one who will sign the bill (into law), right?”

Gordon, chair of the justice committee, on Friday concluded the panel’s deliberations on the proposed bill amending the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act of 2006 after a three-hour hearing attended by child psychologists, human rights advocates and government executives.

Abuse of existing law

After listening to experts’ opinions, he said lowering the minimum age of criminal responsibility would help stem crimes involving youth offenders and protect children from those abusing the existing law.

“Because that’s what I prefer,” Gordon curtly replied to reporters who asked what the basis was for setting the new age.

“That’s what I feel. I’m the chairman (of the Senate justice committee). That’s what I see,” he said. “It satisfies my conscience and it satisfies those who agree with me that 12 years old is reasonable.”

Juvenile offenders

Despite repeatedly saying that “age doesn’t matter” in dealing with juvenile offenders, he insisted that the minimum age should be brought down to 12 years old.

Opposition Sen. Francis Pangilinan explained at the hearing that the juvenile justice law, which he principally authored, already had provisions to make children who committed serious crimes and the adults responsible for their acts account for their crimes.

He said the law did not exempt youth offenders and their parents from serving time and facing criminal liabilities for their offenses.

Failure in enforcement

“There’s a failure in enforcement because the law is very clear that if a child is involved in serious offenses, mandatory confinement is the remedy,” Pangilinan said.

At the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency’s monthly Real Numbers press conference, Presidential Communications Operations Office Assistant Secretary Ana Marie Rafael-Banaag cited police statistics showing that minors accounted for 11,321 crime incidents in 2018.

The figure represented 2.3 percent of last year’s total crime volume of 473,068 nationwide.

She said the number was down from 2.6 percent in 2017 and 2.4 percent in 2016.

Lotta Sylwander, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (Unicef) representative in the Philippines, lamented that local governments and the Department of Social Welfare and Development had failed to enforce the law properly.

“Our stand is that the present juvenile justice and welfare law is a very solid law. The problem lies in the implementation,” Sylwander said at the Senate hearing.

In a statement on Friday, Ateneo de Manila University president Fr. Jose Ramon Villarin criticized the move to lower the age of criminal responsibility, reiterating Ateneo’s opposition to the proposed measure.

He said Congress was trying to revive an “outdated” standard, set almost 90 years ago, referring to the penal code of 1930, which said 15-year-olds could be held criminally liable.

“Such a retreat would ignore decades worth of research in child and adolescent development, psychology, neurobiology and the social sciences,” Villarin said. —WITH REPORTS FROM JAYMEE T. GAMIL AND MARIEJO S. RAMOS