THE Palace says it will launch an information campaign in support of President Rodrigo Duterte’s bid to lower the minimum age of criminal responsibility (MACR) to nine, after a recent opinion poll showed that most Filipinos favor keeping it at 15.
“The stance of the President remains unchanged,” Presidential Spokesman Ernesto Abella said over the weekend. “Lowering the age of criminal liability is part of the legislative agenda of President Duterte as a means to ensure that the Filipino youth would accept responsibility for their actions.”
To achieve his goal, the President will have to convince Congress to amend or repeal the Juvenile and Welfare Act of 2006, which he says is “producing generations of youth offenders who grew up without respect for the law.”
The law, which raised the MACR from nine to 15, allows young offenders to walk free if they are below 15 years of age, regardless of the gravity of the offense.
Bringing back the MACR to nine, supporters of the move say, would stop adult criminals from recruiting children under the age of criminal responsibility for drug trafficking and other serious crimes.
On the other hand, critics of the move say that lowering the MACR would reduce crime, and add that doing so would punish the exploited, not the criminals who exploit them.
The government will also need to offer a reasonable plan on how to deal with the increase in the number of inmates at its already crowded jails and prisons, if the MACR is lowered.
These are issues that the administration needs to adequately address, if it hopes to change the tide of public opinion.
The administration will also need to speak with one voice on this issue. Allowing some Cabinet members such as Social Welfare and Development Secretary Judy Taguiwalo to speak out against the President’s legislative agenda only serves to weaken it. Dissenting points of view need to be considered in the debate, of course, but these ought to come from outside the administration, not from within it.
There is no global agreement on what the MACR should be, but the Duterte administration’s move to lower it would clearly put the country in the opposite direction from which most other countries are heading.
In 2007, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child recommended an “absolute minimum” age of 12 for criminal responsibility, and urged countries to continue to increase it to a higher age level.
If we decide to go against most of the world on this issue, as the administration wants us to do, we should at the very minimum have compelling reasons to do so, and concrete plans to deal with its inevitable consequences.