Domesticating Global Child Rights Norms: A Comparative Study of Juvenile Justice Reform in India and South Africa

Abstract

International child rights instruments, principally the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the standards it has generated through the Beijing Rules, the Havana Rules, and General Comment No. 24, articulate a coherent normative vision of juvenile justice built on diversion, restorative justice, and detention as a measure of last resort. States parties, however, do not receive these norms passively; they localize them through domestic legislative choices, institutional capacity, and political pressure. This article examines how India and South Africa, two CRC signatories with comparable colonial-era legal inheritances and comparable resource constraints, have translated the same international framework into markedly different domestic outcomes. India's Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, enacted in the aftermath of the 2012 Delhi gang-rape case, introduced a mechanism under Section 15 permitting children aged sixteen to eighteen accused of heinous offences to be tried as adults, a departure from the CRC's insistence on eighteen as the uniform ceiling of child justice. South Africa's Child Justice Act 75 of 2008, by contrast, entrenched diversion and restorative justice as the organizing principles of its juvenile justice system without a comparable transfer mechanism. Drawing on Sally Engle Merry's concept of vernacularisation, this article argues that the divergence between the two jurisdictions is not reducible to differences in treaty ratification or constitutional text, but to the differential weight of retributive public sentiment, judicial supervision, and institutional capacity at the point of implementation. The article concludes with recommendations for narrowing India's implementation gap without necessarily abandoning the comparative lessons South Africa offers.