Khawula: Honourable Chairperson, as a result of South Africa’s peculiar evolution into a constitutional democracy, it is important that when we make laws, we take cognisance of particular contexts which have influenced and continue to influence the conduct of most South Africans.
Khawula: This is particularly important when we make laws that affect children, many of whom grow up in dysfunctional families and communities because of the entrenched systems and structures that apartheid and colonialism designed for African people.
Khawula: It has been reported for instance that there is a rapid escalation of a number of child headed households in the country. These children are then more vulnerable to be drawn into criminal activity, drug abuse and dropping out of school at an early age.
Khawula: The Child Justice Amendment Bill correctly diagnoses the problem of assigning criminal capacity to children, and increases the age of criminal capacity from 10 to 12 years.
Khawula: While this is welcome, it is still not sufficient, taking into account the context within which most South African children are raised.
Khawula: Unfortunately, international standards may not be the best guide for this problem, because it is peculiar to South Africa.
Khawula: Criminal capacity means an appreciation of the wrongfulness of an act, and reconciling oneself to that wrongfulness.
Khawula: In the presence of all the social ills facing the development of children in this country; can we for certain reconcile ourselves with a 12 year old having criminal capacity?
Khawula: Why should we seek to criminalise children for failures of the State to provide a good enough foundation for their proper development as children?
Khawula: This age limit is even below what the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child recommended, even for countries without the burden we have. It recommended that State should set the age of criminal capacity at 14 or 16 years.
Khawula: We would as the EFF support raising the age of criminal capacity for children to 16 years, and instead of criminalizing children, we implore the State to take responsibility for its own complicity in sustaining criminal activity in society.
Khawula: Children do no choose to be born in informal settlements where oftentimes the only way out of poverty is through criminal activity. It is rather the government that sustains those conditions through promoting unequal distribution of wealth.
Khawula: Children do not choose to grown in child headed households where often the only option to survival is criminal activity. It is the State that fails to provide quality healthcare and proper services to keep children with their parents.
Khawula: We support the spirit of the Bill in raising the age of criminal capacity, but we would have liked the Bill to have gone further than it has now. We therefore reject the Bill in its current format.
