After a ordinary conflict between teenagers, which left two brothers on the ground with wounds on their backs, the mother of the minors shows the boys’ wounds and accuses police station number 2 in Tirana of not acting and that the police refused to arrest the minors who injured her children.
Due to the “friendly” justice for minors in Albania, the police insist that after taking the data of the perpetrators, among them and those under age, they were released because the law forbids their detention.
“I want them to receive the punishment, to understand the mistake they made. I gave the report to the police, I told them their names, but the police did not arrest them,” said the 17-year-old.
While his mother says: “I am worried. They came to my door, they were armed with knives.”
The Albanian Juvenile Justice Code entered into force in January 2018, and since then the Ministry of Justice had the obligation to make functional some structures that must deal specifically with minors who are perpetrators of criminal offenses. One of them is the structure that controls the measures of restriction of freedom given by the court and the other structure that supervises the educational measure. The latter should be almost the same as what used to be known as the ‘re-education school’.
The prosecutor’s office and the police report that during 2023 these types of crimes tripled, starting from conflicts arising from social networks, bullying, threats, theft or distribution and possession of drugs. But currently there is only one juvenile detention center in Kavaja.
The Juvenile Code promises high interest for the child, therefore, in addition to what the courts and the prosecution apply, such as the avoidance of punishment, it should also announce an educational measure. But so far it has given only one, which belongs to a 13-year-old child who tried to kill his peer. Because it was not implemented due to the lack of structure, the court has no longer announced such decisions.
The sentence of restraining a minor has been announced only in two cases, one of them against the minor who isolated his mother at home after asking her for money to buy drugs.
For the year 2023, 41 minors were sentenced for crimes throughout the country, although 70 were identified as perpetrators of such.
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