These are avenues for reflection and simple questions, but they all reflect a repressive turn. Thursday April 18, during a trip to Viry-Châtillon (Essonne) – town where Shemseddine, 15, recently died – Gabriel Attal gave the broad outlines of the consultation requested by Emmanuel Macron, which should conclude in eight weeks, on youth violence. The Prime Minister thus called for a “surge of authority”.
In her speech, in addition to empowering parents of juvenile delinquents – already mentioned by her predecessor Elisabeth Borne in October 2023 – a long development was devoted to juvenile justice. The goal ? “Adapt our criminal rules” to one “spreading violence”.
Gabriel Attal insisted on three points aimed at “zero impunity” and to “immediate sanction”. First, the possibility of setting up a “immediate appearance in court for young people aged 16 and over”. Afterwards, “work on a penal composition measure without a judge for minors aged 13 and over”. Finally, Mr. Attal mentioned “mitigations of the minority excuse” without, however, specifying them.
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This last principle states that minors have a sentence halved compared to that of adults. It is compulsory between 13 and 16 years old, judges can exclude it between 16 and 18 years old. An old sea serpent of the right and the extreme right, the removal of the minority excuse or its lowering would make a large part of the specificity of juvenile justice disappear. Problem: the principle of autonomy of minors’ criminal law (a more protective procedure, adapted justice, delivered in specialized jurisdictions) is a constitutional principle and is guaranteed by the International Convention on the Rights of the Child of November 20, 1989.
“Penal break”
“We can clearly see that the trend is to bring the treatment of minors closer to that of adults, notes Frédéric Debove, co-director of the Internal Security Academy at Panthéon-Assas University. But in its decision of August 29, 2002, the Constitutional Council considered that three rules cannot be exceeded: the excuse of minority; the primacy of the educational over the repressive and the necessary specialization of the penal chain of measures adapted to age. »
Mr. Debove also notes that the idea of an immediate appearance from the age of 16 calls into question the structure of the juvenile criminal justice code (CJPM) which came into force in 2021, which establishes as a principle that of “penal caesura”. In short: there are two hearings. The first rules on the guilt of the minor (damages may be awarded at that time). Then, after a monitoring and educational support phase, a second hearing decides on the sanction.
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