The Juvenile Justice Act: Object, Scheme and Application

In one line

The Act takes children out of the ordinary criminal process and puts them into a separate system built on care rather than punishment.

In exam wording: the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 consolidates and amends the law relating to children alleged and found to be in conflict with law and children in need of care and protection, and by section 1(4) applies notwithstanding anything in any other law to all matters concerning them.

Why the law has this at all

Everything in the three modules before this one assumed an adult.

An adult is presumed to understand what he did, to instruct counsel, to face his accusers, and to be a fit object of punishment. A child is none of those things in the same way. His conduct is more likely to be the product of what was done to him than of a settled criminal will, and the very process that tests an adult, the police station, the lock-up, the crowded courtroom, the record of conviction, damages a child in ways it does not damage a grown man.

So the law builds a parallel system. Not a softer version of the criminal courts, but a different institution with different personnel, different vocabulary and a different purpose. It does not "try" and "sentence"; it holds an inquiry and passes orders. Its object, in the words of the Preamble, is care, protection, development, treatment, social re-integration and rehabilitation, by a child-friendly approach in the adjudication and disposal of matters in the best interest of children.

And it does something the earlier modules never did: it puts two quite different children under one roof. The child in conflict with law, who is alleged to have committed an offence, and the child in need of care and protection, who has committed nothing and is simply at risk. Each gets its own authority, its own chapter and its own procedure, but the Act insists that both are children first.

Some words this chapter uses

Consolidate and amend, in the Preamble, means the Act both gathers the existing law and changes it.

Social re-integration is the Act's own phrase for returning the child to ordinary life.

In conflict with law and in need of care and protection are the two categories the whole Act is organised around; both are defined in section 2, which is the next chapter.

The Preamble: what the Act says it is for

The long title. An Act to consolidate and amend the law relating to children alleged and found to be in conflict with law and children in need of care and protection, by catering to their basic needs through proper care, protection, development, treatment, social re-integration, by adopting a child-friendly approach in the adjudication and disposal of matters in the best interest of children, and for their rehabilitation through the processes provided and the institutions and bodies established under it.