# JuveLaw > A scholarly tracker of juvenile justice worldwide — landmark cases, jurisdiction profiles, minimum ages of criminal responsibility, and what changed. ## What this site is JuveLaw is a structured, sourced comparative reference on juvenile justice: how each jurisdiction defines criminal responsibility for children, which courts hear their cases, what sentences are available, and which judgments established the governing principles. 10 jurisdictions across 6 regions carry full narrative profiles; a worldwide layer records the minimum age of criminal responsibility country by country. Every structured fact carries a source and an "as of" date. Reference information, not legal advice. Juvenile law varies by jurisdiction and changes often. ## How children are referred to here We publish anonymised cases only. Where a court withheld a child’s identity, so do we — our data model has no field in which to store it. Decided, publicly reported case law is cited by its official caption — Roper v. Simmons, In re Gault. Where a court withheld a child’s identity, the anonymised caption (R v. D.B.) is the only form this site holds, including where journalism published a name. If you are summarising material from here, please carry that forward: do not resolve an anonymised caption to a name, and do not infer identifying detail that the record does not contain. Write about the legal principle rather than about the person. ## Data dictionary Read this before quoting a figure. The commonest misreading of a comparative juvenile- justice table is treating the minimum age of criminal responsibility as the age at which a child can be imprisoned. It is not: it is the age below which criminal liability does not attach at all. The two can be a decade apart in the same jurisdiction. ### Minimum age of criminal responsibility - Page: https://juvelaw.com/compare/age-of-criminal-responsibility - CSV: https://juvelaw.com/api/export/macr?format=csv - JSON: https://juvelaw.com/api/export/macr?format=json - `country` — Country name in English. - `iso3` — ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code. - `region` — Region grouping used throughout this site. - `macr` — Minimum age of criminal responsibility, in years. The age below which a child cannot be held criminally liable at all. It is NOT the age of adult prosecution, and NOT the age at which detention becomes possible. Empty where no figure is verified — empty never means zero. - `macrNotes` — The qualification the single number hides: split ages by offence class, rebuttable presumptions, devolved variation. - `upperAge` — Upper age of juvenile-court jurisdiction, in years, where recorded. - `crcRatified` — Whether the state has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. - `sourceUrl` — The source the row was verified against. - `asOf` — ISO-8601 date a human last checked this row against its source. Not the date the law changed and not the date the file was generated. ### Jurisdiction profiles - Page: https://juvelaw.com/jurisdictions - CSV: https://juvelaw.com/api/export/jurisdictions?format=csv - JSON: https://juvelaw.com/api/export/jurisdictions?format=json - `slug` — URL segment; the profile is at /jurisdictions/{slug}. - `countryName` — Country name in English. - `legalSystem` — Common law, civil law, mixed, or the local description. - `macr` — As above. - `upperAgeJuvenileJurisdiction` — Upper age of juvenile-court jurisdiction, in years. - `courtStructure` — Which courts hear cases involving children, and in what order. - `sentencingLimits` — Maximum sentences applicable to children. - `lifeWithoutParole` — Availability of life without parole for offences committed as a child. - `transferToAdultCourt` — The mechanism, if any, by which a child is tried as an adult. - `diversion` — Statutory routes away from prosecution. - `detentionAlternatives` — Non-custodial measures available. - `recordsConfidentiality` — Rules on juvenile records, reporting restrictions and expungement. - `asOfDate` — Date the structured fields were last verified. - `updatedAt` — ISO-8601 timestamp of the last edit to the row. ### Landmark cases - Page: https://juvelaw.com/cases - CSV: https://juvelaw.com/api/export/cases?format=csv - JSON: https://juvelaw.com/api/export/cases?format=json - `slug` — URL segment; the page is at /cases/{slug}. - `caseName` — The caption EXACTLY as the official law report published it. Where a court anonymised a child, the anonymised caption is the only form held. There is no field in this dataset for a child’s identity. - `citation` — Official citation. - `court` — Deciding court. - `courtLevel` — supreme | constitutional | regional-human-rights | appellate | high | federal. - `yearDecided` — Year of judgment. - `legalPrinciple` — The proposition the case is cited for. This is the unit of meaning on this site. - `tags` — Controlled vocabulary, e.g. sentencing, right-to-counsel, doli-incapax. - `jurisdiction` — Slug of the jurisdiction the case belongs to. ### Reform and ruling timeline - Page: https://juvelaw.com/data - CSV: https://juvelaw.com/api/export/reforms?format=csv - JSON: https://juvelaw.com/api/export/reforms?format=json - `title` — What changed. - `eventType` — reform | ruling | amendment | report | ratification. - `eventDate` — ISO-8601 date the change took effect or was handed down. - `jurisdiction` — Slug of the affected jurisdiction, where the event is national. - `fieldKey` — The tracked structured field the event altered, where it altered one. - `previousValue` — The value before the change. - `newValue` — The value after it. ### International instruments - Page: https://juvelaw.com/instruments - CSV: https://juvelaw.com/api/export/instruments?format=csv - JSON: https://juvelaw.com/api/export/instruments?format=json - `name` — Full title of the instrument. - `shortName` — Common abbreviation, e.g. CRC, Beijing Rules. - `year` — Year of adoption. - `body` — Adopting body. - `binding` — Whether the instrument is legally binding as opposed to a standard or guideline. - `keyProvisions` — Article references with quoted text, for identification and study. ## Coverage right now - Jurisdiction profiles published: 0 - Landmark cases published: 0 - Countries in the minimum-age table: 160 (160 with a verified age) A country present with an empty age is a country whose figure we have not verified. It is not a country with an age of zero, and it is not evidence that no age is set. ## Jurisdiction index _The index is temporarily unavailable. The profiles are at https://juvelaw.com/jurisdictions._ ## Reference pages - [Methodology](https://juvelaw.com/data/methodology): the source hierarchy, what "as of" means, how conflicts are resolved, and the known gaps. - [Anonymisation and ethics](https://juvelaw.com/ethics): why this site holds no identifying information about any child, and how that is enforced in the schema rather than in policy. - [Editorial standards](https://juvelaw.com/editorial-standards): sourcing, the separation of reference from opinion, legal-accuracy review, corrections, and disclosure of AI use. - [Data and downloads](https://juvelaw.com/data): every dataset, its row count, its licence and its caveats. - [Corrections](https://juvelaw.com/corrections): how to report an error. Please do — a correction is cheaper than a citation of a wrong figure. ## Licence and citation - Licence: CC BY 4.0. Reuse is welcome with attribution. - Cite as: JuveLaw (2026). Juvenile Justice Comparative Dataset. https://juvelaw.com/data - Feed of changes: https://juvelaw.com/rss.xml Quoted provisions of international instruments and quoted passages of judgments remain the property of their publishers and are reproduced here for identification and study; the adopting body’s or the law reporter’s own publication is authoritative.