Suspects are not Humanity, says Justice Secretary
by Fr Shay Cullen
Small children of nine are to be branded as criminals and to be held responsible for childhood mistakes. Stealing when they are hungry and abandoned. Fighting back when they are abused and bullied. They cry when there is no one to feed them. What are they expected to do to survive? That’s the plight of thousands of abandoned boys and girls in the Philippines today.
According to Representative Pantaleon Alvarez, the Speaker of the lower house of the Philippine Congress, the country is crime-ridden and it can be blamed on criminals who start at the age of nine. The law must be changed to lower the minimum age of criminal responsibility from the present 15 years old to nine years old.
The reason cited is that children are used by syndicates to commit serious crimes because at 15 and younger they cannot be prosecuted. This is not true. There is no evidence to support such a statement. All research and statistics point in the opposite direction, that children are not to blame for the crimes of adults. Children below 15 cannot discern what is unlawful.
But the Congress representatives want to please President Rodrigo Duterte who believes that even children are criminals. Several members of his cabinet do not agree with the lowering of the minimum age and they oppose it. Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez advised the cabinet secretaries who are against it to resign if they don’t agree with the President.
Many disagree. The secretaries heading the government agencies are there to advise, support, guide, object as necessary and suggest the right and true way of good governance. When they comment on presidential proposals, they are required to be rational, study the data and science and be guided by it. They are not dummies or robots, as the Speaker would have them to be.
Full article on the Preda website here.