The participation of juvenile defendants in the youth court

In international children’s rights law it is stipulated that minors who are in conflict with the law should be handled by specialised youth courts and trained professionals. These two notions are combined in this study. In this presentation I will present some of the main findings from our recently published book The Effective Youth Court (Rap & Weijers, 2014, Eleven International Publishing).Between 2000 and 2012, the cases of in total 3,019 juvenile defendants were observed in youth courts and other competent administrative bodies in the juvenile justice systems in 11 European countries, namely Belgium, England and Wales, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Scotland, Spain and Switzerland. Finally, combining our normative framework with our empirical findings, best practices in the youth court procedure in Europe are designated with regard to the actual participation of juvenile defendants. Overall, it can be concluded from this study that structural differences between systems, such as the legal tradition (i.e. the inquisitorial and the adversarial tradition) and the setting in which hearings take place, have an important influence on the participation of juvenile defendants.