In a joint document, groups such as the Argentine State Workers’ Association (ATE), the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo-Linea Fundadora, the Hijos organization, and the Frente Patria Grande denounced the dismantling of policies for protecting children and adolescents and urged society to speak out against minors’ criminalization.
The Permanent Assembly for Human Rights, the Autonomous-Argentinian Trade Union (CTA-A), the Justicialist Party (PJ), the Center for Legal and Social Studies, and many other organizations also signed the statement.
The government insists on the necessity of lowering the age of criminal responsibility to 13 years, as a manner of containing what it deems as the “growing rate of juvenile crime” in the country. This argument is false and demagogic since available statistics point in the opposite direction; the document indicates.
Currently, more than a million children go to bed without dinner due to the crisis caused by the Executive. We demand that children’s rights be respected. For our children, bread, and education, not prison and poverty, it adds.
The organizations recount there are 3.5 million adolescents aged 13 to 17 years old in Argentina, and only 4,299 of them are serving time for crimes committed, which stands for only 0.12 percent of the total population in that age.
ied/iff/dfm/gas
