T

he Jakarta Legal Aid Foundation (LBH Jakarta) has recently launched a report center for children who have been charged in criminal cases to provide them with legal assistance and to make sure that law enforcement officers proceed with the cases in accordance to regulations.

Johannes Gea, a lawyer with LBH Jakarta, said he still found police officers and state prosecutors who, when handling child criminal cases, did not consider the children'€™s rights and treated them as if they were adults.

'€œWe hope that the newly launched report center can provide the required advocacy for children and make sure that everyone, especially police officers and state prosecutors, is aware of children'€™s rights,'€ Johannes told The Jakarta Post recently at the LBH Jakarta office in Central Jakarta.

Johannes said he believed some law enforcers were not aware that after the Child Criminal Justice System Law No. 11/2012 came into effect in July 2014 they were supposed to hold mediation sessions between the offending minors and the victims to divert the proceedings away from a trial. The law defines a child as anyone who is not older than 18 years.

'€œPolice and prosecutors are obligated to apply the diversion mechanism with a number of conditions,'€ Johannes said.

Article 7 of the law stipulates that the diversion mechanism must be applied in the investigation and prosecution phase if the alleged crime committed by a minor has a maximum sentence of seven years imprisonment.

Article 6 says that the goal of the diversion mechanism is to reach an out-of-court settlement in criminal cases and prevent the state from forcefully taking away a child'€™s independence, as well as to teach the child a sense of responsibility.

Johannes added that in 2014 LBH Jakarta handled an assault case allegedly committed by a 16-year-old boy against a police officer.

'€œThe boy was detained in a cell with adults before we stepped in and became his legal representative,'€ he said.

Separately, the chairman of the National Commission for Child Protection (Komnas PA), Arist Merdeka Sirait, said a number of police officers and state prosecutors fail to take age into consideration when handling criminal cases.

'€œPolice and state prosecutors are still using a law enforcement point of view that considers that any offenders must be punished regardless of their ages,'€ Arist told the Post.

He said the diversion process for children was an important breakthrough for the country'€™s legal system as it would be able to give minors second chances in their lives after they commit crimes.

Based on the Komnas PA data, in 2011 the commission received 1,851 criminal case reports related to children across the country, 89.8 percent of which ended with guilty verdicts. The data also revealed that thefts were the most commonly reported cases, accounting for 52 percent of them, followed by violence, rape and drug abuse cases.

However, Johannes said the diversion mechanism could also be abused by law enforcers as a tool for extorting money out of an offending juvenile in exchange for discontinuing the legal process.

'€œWe can just hope our police officers and state prosecutors will not abuse this diversion mechanism,'€ he said.