A representative of the United Nations children’s agency in the Philippines said that the proposal to lower the minimum age of criminal liability (MACL) from 15 to nine is “wrong from every angle.”
Lowering the MACL is the pet project of House speaker Pantaleon Alvarez. Earlier this month, he said that Cabinet secretaries of national agencies who are against his proposal should just resign.
“Apart from the fact that it’s against human rights, it’s very unfair to a child, to punish them in such a harsh way as the criminal system would be, for something that they never understood was that serious,” said Unicef’s country representative, Lotta Sylwander in a report by UK newspaper, The Guardian.
“By incarcerating children at such a young age, they in fact become well-trained criminals by being brought up in prisons with other criminals,” she added.
At the same time, a draft bill for the restoration of death penalty in the Philippines is also in the works. This could lead to a situation where a nine-year-old kid could be executed.
Read: Hontiveros says death penalty plus lower age of criminal liability could lead to ‘death row kids’
Sylwander added that incarcerating children does not fix the problem. She said that the government should go after the big syndicates instead.
According to the United Nations, setting the age of criminal liability below 12 is “not to be internationally acceptable.”
