Reforming Indonesia’s Juvenile Justice System: Lost cause or worth the investment?

The debate on how juvenile offenders should be handled is probably one where consensus will never be reached. This article discusses the Juvenile Justice bill under consideration in Indonesia in 2012. The Juvenile Justice bill was developed to replace the Juvenile Court Law with a more comprehensive law that would increase the minimum age for criminal responsibility from 8 to at least 12 years old, institute diversion practices that allow children to be handled through mediation and facilitation at any stage of the formal proceeding, guarantee a speedy process when a child needs to go through the justice system and employ restorative principles involving family and community. Before the bill, children going through the system were mostly treated the same way as adults, and regulations did not accommodate the needs of children going through the criminal justice system as victims or witnesses.