On the national level, the approval of the Law 27.801 on the Juvenile Criminal Regime set the minimum age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 14 years in Argentina. However, the fight against crime clashes with the resistance of the ideological guaranteeism embodied by sectors of Kirchnerism entrenched in the Justice system.
The epicenter of this institutional blockage is located in the Juvenile, Contraventional and Misdemeanor Court No. 3 of Buenos Aires City, led by Judge Laura Beatriz De Marinis. Breaking the silence on Radio con Vos before journalists Ernesto Tenembaum and Gustavo Grabia, Judge Laura Beatriz De Marinis sought to justify her controversial ruling. In that interview, she uttered the phrase that outraged society: “Subjecting a 14-year-old to the criminal system is stigmatizing”.
Exonerating the minor from his responsibilities, the judge stated verbatim: “Applying the criminal system, the response from the criminal system, is regressive for this adolescent, because it is stigmatizing. In this context, we are dealing with a child who was not known to the State, who was without education and without food; we learned about his situation through the criminal system and then we apply the criminal system. Does that seem reasonable to you? I explained that it is not proportional”.
She also maintained that “subjecting to criminal proceedings is the last thing that should happen” and argued that “the law is in effect from the age of 14 and the 14-year-old population does not know it”. She even absurdly described the government's norm as “a beautiful tool to harmonize it with the Convention and to be able to work with the kids on a day-to-day basis”.
The specific case occurred on September 10 around 6:00 a.m. in CABA, when a 47-year-old man was chased by a group of teenagers. The victim ran, asked a police officer for help, and the youths were detained. With no injuries or completed robbery, the judge ordered the dismissal of the accused M.I.A., aged 14, qualifying the attempt as “clumsy and awkward”.
In her ruling, she justified: “As adults, we cannot punish children and adolescents for what we did not do, for having left them in abandonment in their early childhood, for not providing them with a normative figure that allows them to become responsible subjects”. She ordered the case to be referred to the Council for the Rights of Children and Adolescents, a ruling that was appealed by the prosecution and sent to the Chamber.
