A foundational instrument

Imagine a 15-year-old child standing in court today, accused of having committed a criminal offence. How the child is treated and whether he or she is merely punished or supported and given a real second chance, may very well depend on ideas that were written down long before the child was born. Many of those ideas can be traced back to the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice, better known as ‘The Beijing Rules’, and 2025 marks their 40th anniversary.

Adopted on 29 November 1985, the Beijing Rules were the first relevant set of juvenile justice standards developed at the international level and adopted by the United Nations. From the outset, they connected juvenile justice with social justice and the well-being of the child: States are called to promote children’s ‘meaningful life in the community’, to minimise the need for formal intervention and in doing so to reduce ‘the harm that may be caused by any intervention’. While preceding the rapidly increasing scientific attention to child and adolescent development, including advances in brain development in the new millennium that confirm that children and adolescents are categorically lesser culpable and have different needs in terms of participation and effective interventions, the Beijing Rules are grounded in the notion that children ‘require particular care and assistance’ as well as ‘legal protection’ in the context of juvenile justice due to ‘their early stage of human development’.

These core messages have had a tremendous impact on how countries around the world organise their juvenile justice systems. Forty years on, this anniversary is one to commemorate. At the same time, we need to ask the question: if the Beijing Rules shaped how we see juvenile justice today, how do we want to see juvenile justice in the next forty years?

More than offenders: children with rights

The Beijing Rules sit firmly within the broader body of children’s rights standards. They start from a simple idea: when a child is accused of an offence, the response should take the child’s well-being seriously and be proportionate not only to what happened, but also to the child’s situation and needs.

The Beijing Rules also bring classic fair-trial guarantees into juvenile justice: the presumption of innocence, the right to be notified of charges, the right to remain silent, the right to counsel, the presence of a parent or guardian, the right to cross-examine witnesses and the right to appeal. The rules are also strong concerning the protection of privacy at all stages of the juvenile justice system. They furthermore stress that the age of criminal responsibility must not be set too low, bearing in mind the emotional, mental and intellectual maturity of children. Taken together, these provisions embed key children’s rights principles directly into juvenile justice practice.

Influence in law and practice

The Beijing Rules have had a profound influence on the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), on the Committee on the Rights of the Child’s General Comments and on regional and domestic case law and legislative reform. The CRC builds on and essentially codifies the Beijing Rules in Article 40, which, among others, requires that children alleged to have committed, or recognised as having infringed the penal law, are treated in a manner consistent with their dignity, young age, lack of full maturity and lesser culpability, with the primary aim of facilitating their reintegration into society. It also paved the way for Article 37 CRC’s provisions on the arrest, detention or imprisonment of children.

The right of children to participate in juvenile justice proceedings was explicitly introduced in the Beijing Rules, which call for proceedings that are in the child’s best interests and take place ‘in an atmosphere of understanding’ that allows children to participate and to express their views freely. This idea was further developed under Article 12 of the CRC, which recognises the child’s right to be heard in all matters affecting them, and informed the development of the concept of child-friendly justice. The Committee on the Rights of the Child builds on the Beijing Rules in its guidance to the States on how to implement juvenile justice systems that are aligned with the rights enshrined in the CRC.

Looking ahead: the next forty years

There is, undeniably, much to celebrate in the Beijing Rules at forty. Without these rules, the global conversation about children in conflict with the law would have looked very different. Juvenile justice has become a matter of children’s rights, and the Beijing Rules paved the way for this. At the same time, experience shows that the relationship between juvenile justice and children’s rights remains complex and tense. Minimum ages of criminal responsibility remain contested, deprivation of liberty is overused despite the Beijing Rules’ principles of ‘last resort’ and ‘minimum necessary period’, and many systems continue to prosecute children as adults. On top of this, the Beijing Rules are built on the idea that the juvenile justice systems need to be adjusted to children, whereas we would rather build the system around children and place their rights, needs and views truly at the centre. In this context, the 40th anniversary of the Beijing Rules is both a reason to commemorate and a chance to recognise that it is high time to renew our commitment to children in conflict with the law and reimagine juvenile justice systems entirely.