A Study On The Procedure Of Testimony Of Juvenile Witness In Criminal Proceedings

This paper mainly explores how to protect the legitimate rights & interests ofjuvenilesfrom the perspective of testifying procedures as they act aseyewitnesses in criminal cases, so as to ensure them to participate in the judicial processes. Juveniles are the future and the key protectiveobjects of a country. China has introduced some relevant laws & regulations to protect the legitimate rights&interests of the juveniles. But in China, the existing legislation & judicial interpretations of the provisions for the juvenile witness in criminal cases are mostly abstract and vague. There are flaws in the protection of juvenilesduring the judicial practice. In 2012. the special procedures of juvenilecases were added into the "Amendment of Criminal Procedure Code", which involvedthe testifying provisions for juveniles. However, this amendment mainly focused the protection of minors as a suspect or the accused but there were drawbacks for the protection of juvenile witnesses. I hope that more people are concerned about the protection of juvenile witnesses through this paper, thus promoting the development of testifying procedures for the juveniles.Determining the testifying eligibility of juveniles is the premise todiscuss the testifying procedures of them, so the first part of this paper is to talk about the eligibility of minors to testify. Like most countries, Chinese legislation & judicial practices have recognized the qualifications of the juvenilesto testify but some problems like high-standard censorship and the missing of the reviewing process, etc have appeared. Based on ascertaining the testifying qualifications of juveniles, the paper mainly focuses on the testifying procedures of juveniles. Unlike adult witnesses,when juveniles participate in the entire case to testify themselves in criminal proceedings, their physical and mental development is still in an immature stage. They are highly susceptible to external environment and their interestsare also very vulnerable. Therefore, it is very necessary to formulate the testifying procedures of juveniles and make some modifications of the adults’ testifying procedures.Unfortunately, there are few provisions for that in Chinese legislation and the principle regulations are more than the operative details. Because of the lack of legislative support, the testifying procedures of juveniles in judicial practices fail to draw attention from judicial officers and they cannot be differentiated from the testifying procedures of adult witnesses in many cases. In view of the problems above, the fifth part in this paper has explored the measures to improve the testifying procedures of juveniles in China.Unlike civil proceedings,the trial of the criminal proceedings is very serious and tense. Whilethe juveniles are vulnerable to the interference outside, sometimes their presencein court may not only affect the accuracy and credibility of their witnesses’testimony, but also will influence their physical and mental growth.Therefore, formulatingthe alternative measures for the juveniles not to be present in court is the key point to studying the testifying procedures of theirs, as it protects the juvenile witnesses better on the basis of guarding the rights of the accused. The authorhas learnedrelatively complete experience from countries like the witness & evidence system in Britain,and proposed some alternative measures like the video testimony and video cross-examination etc. The paper alsohas put forward some related countermeasures to improve the collection of pre-trial evidence and conduct the protection procedures for the witnesses.