Things have changed in Chilean juvenile justice. Analysis of the main reforms to the law on adolescent criminal responsibility introduced by Law No. 21,527.

 

This paper offers an analysis of the reforms to the Youth Criminal Justice Act introduced by Act N° 21,527. For this, firstly, it reviews the background of the legal body in question and then examines the twelve most relevant reforms, using specialized literature and comparative law.

Tags: juvenile justice, reform Act N° 20,084, juvenile social reintegration, Chilean juvenile justice

This paper is an English translation and enriched version of an article previously published in Revista de Derecho Penal y Criminología (Argentina), XV (4), 201-225 available in https://bit.ly/4jZ7qzE

On June 8, 2007, Chile finally had a juvenile justice system with the enactment of Law No. 20.084 on Adolescent Criminal Responsibility (hereinafter LRPA). In his inaugural address, President Ricardo Lagos (2005:2) outlined some of the central ideas of the new legislation:

“The answer to juvenile delinquency, then, is the construction of a juvenile justice system, which is what this law establishes—a strict but fair system that punishes criminal acts committed by adolescents while adhering to the guarantees of due process. That is what is new. Accountability means taking responsibility for actions that violate legally protected rights, such as life, liberty, harm to others, and property, but the sanction is part of a broader socio-educational intervention aimed at social integration. This is the fundamental element: the sanction also addresses how we can intervene to facilitate subsequent social reintegration.”

Punishment and rehabilitation were thus incorporated into Chilean criminal law, through article 20 of the LRPA, as aims of the new system and, at the same time, as differentiating elements of the state's reaction to crime committed by adults. (Bates 2007)

In these eighteen years it has only been modified in very minor aspects on four occasions.

On January 12, 2023, Law No. 21,527 was published. This law has a dual purpose: First, it creates the National Juvenile Social Reintegration Service and thus ends the National Service for Minors (SENAME), due to successive crises of this public agency (Castillo-Gallardo et al., 2022, Estrada and Jara, 2023). Secondly, it substantially modifies various aspects of Law No. 20,084.

This paper aims, firstly, to provide the contextual background of the legal framework in question, and then to review the most relevant reforms in light of specialized literature and comparative law. International human rights law for children and adolescents will also be used on occasion for comparison, in order to increase scrutiny of the introduced modifications.

Link to paper here,