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Abstract

Juvenile delinquents have always been of special interest to legal practitioners and scholars of law and law-related disciplines, such as criminology, striving to determine how they should be protected by law. Enacting a differentiated law in both substantive and procedural criminal law can be the first step in protecting them. If juvenile substantive criminal law, as the normative section of criminal justice, is defective, then justice cannot be recovered by means of procedural criminal law and through due process. Furthermore, in recent decades, respect for basic rights of juveniles and the importance of criminological research in this field have become major themes in international discourse, initiating a movement toward the recognition and implementation of common, minimum standards of juvenile justice. Germany has recognized these international standards, and Iran has recently paid more attention to such measures in the formulation of its juvenile justice rules. Due to a number of clashes between Islamic Law, customary law, and international obligations, however, Iran has not yet found a definite, integrative strategy for the treatment of juvenile delinquents. The theoretical part of this book investigates – historically and comparatively – the criminal law governing juvenile delinquency in Iran, Germany, and the United Nations. It introduces a model for reforming the structure of Iran’s juvenile criminal law, which has lost touch with the country’s social realities. The empirical part of this study analyzes the public attitudes of the elites toward juvenile justice in Iran, which generally prove to be supportive of international standards.