The Juvenile Justice Board

In one line

The Board is the court for children in conflict with law, and it is deliberately not a court in the ordinary sense: two of its three members are social workers.

In exam wording: sections 4 to 9 of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 provide for the constitution, composition, disqualifications, procedure, powers and functions of the Juvenile Justice Board, and for what a Magistrate not empowered under the Act must do.

Why the law has this at all

If children were to be dealt with differently, somebody had to be given the job, and the choice of who says everything about what the Act is trying to do.

A judge alone would have produced a smaller criminal court. What the Act does instead is to put a Magistrate on a bench with two social workers, at least one of them a woman, and to require of those social workers seven years of active involvement in health, education or welfare activities pertaining to children, or a professional degree in child psychology, psychiatry, sociology or law. The legal member brings the safeguards; the other two bring the knowledge of children that a Magistrate has no reason to possess.

The rest of the chapter follows from that choice. The venue must not resemble a regular court and must not be intimidating, section 7(1). The Board deals exclusively with children in conflict with law in its district, section 8(1). And section 9 catches the case the system will otherwise get wrong: an ordinary Magistrate before whom a child is produced must stop, record his opinion, and forward the child.

Some words this chapter uses

Principal Magistrate is the Act's name for the judicial member of the Board.

Social investigation report is the report on the child's antecedents, family background and circumstances, prepared by the Probation Officer or a Child Welfare Officer.

Individual care plan is the plan for the child's rehabilitation that the final order must include.

Section 4: constitution and composition

Sub-section (1). Notwithstanding anything in the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, the State Government shall constitute for every district one or more Juvenile Justice Boards for exercising the powers and discharging the functions relating to children in conflict with law.

Sub-section (2), the composition. A Board consists of:

• a Metropolitan Magistrate or a Judicial Magistrate of the First Class, not being a Chief Metropolitan Magistrate or Chief Judicial Magistrate, referred to as the Principal Magistrate, with at least three years' experience; and
• two social workers selected as prescribed, of whom at least one shall be a woman,

forming a Bench; and every such Bench has the powers conferred by the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 on a Metropolitan Magistrate or a Judicial Magistrate of the First Class.