The General Principles

In one line

Chapter II is a single section listing sixteen principles that everybody administering the Act is bound to be guided by.

In exam wording: section 3 of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 lays down the fundamental principles by which the Central Government, the State Governments, the Board, the Committee and other agencies shall be guided while implementing the Act.

Why the law has this at all

Most Indian statutes do not have a section like this. They define, they empower, they prohibit, and they leave the spirit of the thing to be inferred.

This Act does not, and the reason is that the people who work it are not, mostly, lawyers. A social worker on a Board, a Child Welfare Police Officer, the superintendent of an observation home, a member of a Child Welfare Committee, all of them make decisions about a child every day, and few of those decisions are the sort a court reviews. If the Act said only what may be done, the manner of doing it would be left to habit, and habit in institutions is not reliably kind.

So the Act states its own values, at the front, in one section, in language that can be read by somebody who is not a lawyer. Sixteen principles, each with a name.

And they are not decoration. Section 3 says the listed authorities shall be guided by the following fundamental principles, which makes them a standard against which an order can be tested. When a Board institutionalises a child without considering an alternative, the principle it has broken has a name: institutionalisation as a measure of last resort.

Some words this chapter uses

Mala fide, in principle (i), means with bad faith or wrongful intent.

Diversion, in principle (xv), means dealing with a child without resorting to judicial proceedings.

Repatriation is the return of a child to his own country or place; restoration is the return to his family and to his former status.

Section 3: who is bound

The Central Government, the State Governments, the Board, the Committee, or other agencies, as the case may be, while implementing the provisions of this Act, shall be guided by the following fundamental principles.

The words "the Board, the Committee, or" were substituted for "the Board, and" by Act 23 of 2021, section 3, with effect from 1 September 2022, which put the Child Welfare Committee expressly under the principles.

The sixteen principles

(i) Principle of presumption of innocence. Any child shall be presumed to be innocent of any mala fide or criminal intent up to the age of eighteen years.

(ii) Principle of dignity and worth. All human beings shall be treated with equal dignity and rights.