Debating and amending the age of criminal responsibility in Hong Kong: Penal elitism, governmental legitimacy and the ‘re-sinicization’ of Hong Kong

• In Event: Legal Order and Social Control: Comparative Analyses

Abstract

The minimum age of criminal responsibility (MACR) serves as a border of identity, codified through law, which draws together contested notions of childhood, cognitive maturity and morality. Drawing from research explicated in our forthcoming book, with Routledge, Responding to Youth Crime in Hong Kong: Penal Elitism, Legitimacy and Citizenship, we center on debates and policy responses to the MACR in Hong Kong as a proxy to mine its penal elitist governing mentality. While debates took place during the 1970s and 1980s, widespread consultation and reforms only followed after the 1997 return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty. While children below the MACR were consistently represented as victims who demanded responses based on their needs over their criminal deeds, we draw attention to the timing of policy amendments, such as Hong Kong’s ratification in 1994 of the United Nations International Convention on the Rights of the Child, which we show relates more with the new Beijing-appointed government’s need for political legitimacy than responding to youth crime per se. We animate discussions of theory serving to advance international comparative criminology.

Authors

• Michael Charles Adorjan, University of Calgary

• Wing Hong Chui, University of Hong Kong