Survival of the Protection Model? Competing Goals in Belgian Juvenile Justice
Belgium is a small (with a surface of 32.545 km2) but well-situated country in the northwest of Europe. It consists of over 10 million citizens (10,396,421 on 1 January 2004) of whom 6 million live in the Northern, Dutch-speaking part (Flanders), almost 3.4 million in the Southern, mostly French-speaking part and close to 1 million in the region of Brussels (bilingual). As in other European countries, families in Belgium are becoming smaller and smaller. The fertility rate is 1.56 children per woman. So Belgium is faced with an aging population, 15% of whom are older than 65. The portion of juveniles (0–19 years) has diminished from 24.6% in 1990 to 22.4% in 2003 and the prognosis is a further decrease to 20.2% in 2021 (VRIND, 2003). On 1 January 2004 Belgium consisted of approximately 875,000 juveniles aged 12–17,1 almost half a million of them live in the Flemish region, more than 300,000 in the Walloon part and over 75,000 in the region of Brussels.2
The Referral of Juvenile Offenders to the Adult Court in Belgium: Theory and Practice
In Belgium the juvenile judge can exceptionally refer a juvenile offender aged 16 years or over to the Public Prosecutor with the intent of prosecuting and sentencing the minor before the adult court. As in the UK and the USA, this transfer mechanism is increasingly pushed forward as a preferential solution for serious juvenile offenders. With this, a more classic penal angle and an increased repressive tenor seem to have entered the juvenile justice system and are replacing the individualised justice and rehabilitative ideal. That this new culture of control with facilitated waiver conditions and 'populist' policy discourse does not necessarily result in more repressive judicial practices can be illustrated with Belgian transfer statistics and interviews with magistrates.
Certification to Criminal Court: The Important Policy Questions of How, When, and Why
Recent juvenile justice commentators have been guilty of serious misrepresentations about the process of transferring juvenile defendants to criminal court. If accepted, these misrepresentations could lead to dramatic changes in juvenile court certification policy. The purposes of this article are twofold. The first is to thoroughly explicate the transfer phenomenon and thereby neutralize the misrepresentations in the literature. The second objective is to identify the perspectives of various juvenile court workers regarding certification so as to further enable policymakers to comprehend and to address this volatile subject.