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Chief Justice of India Surya Kant on Saturday said names of 'children in conflict with the law' must be kept out of the news and off the internet, and the phrase describes a circumstance, not an identity. He was speaking after inaugurating the National Annual Stakeholders' Consultation on "Ten Years of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015: Progress, Challenges and Priorities for the Next Decade" organised by the Juvenile Justice Committee of the Supreme Court in association with UNICEF. The CJI said 10 years is a short time for a statute, but it is more than half of a childhood. The 2015 Act, he said, makes a wager that a child given a second chance is far more likely to become a productive member of society than one branded as a criminal. "The journey truly ends only when the past no longer casts a shadow over the future. For that, we must destroy old records on time, and keep the names of 'children in conflict with law' out of the news and off the ...
More than 50,000 children in conflict with the law remain stuck in a slow-moving justice system where over half the cases are pending at 362 Juvenile Justice Boards (JJBs), according to a new India Justice Report (IJR) study released on Thursday. Despite ten years of the Juvenile Justice Act coming into force, glaring gaps, ranging from missing judges, under-inspected homes, absent data systems and wide state-level disparities continue to afflict justice delivery, the study said. The report, Juvenile Justice and Children in Conflict with the Law: A Study of Capacity at the Frontlines, shows that as of October 31, 2023, 55 per cent of 100,904 cases before JJBs were pending, with pendency ranging from 83 per cent in Odisha to 35 per cent in Karnataka. Though 92 per cent of India's 765 districts have constituted JJBs, one in four boards operates without a full bench. On average, each JJB carried a backlog of 154 cases. The findings come against the backdrop of 40,036 juveniles being .