PRIORITIZING CHILDREN’S BEST INTERESTS IN CANADIAN YOUTH JUSTICE: ARTICLE 3 OF THE UN CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD AND CHILD-FRIENDLY ALTERNATIVES
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child confers on children a number of rights, not the least of which is the guarantee that their best interests shall be a primary consideration in all actions that concern them. This article applies the Best Interests of the Child [BIC] principle—a widespread concept in family law—to the context of criminal policy. It calls for a rebalancing of Canadian youth justice so as to prioritize children’s best interests. As marginalized societal actors, children are at risk of seeing their interests increasingly overlooked if they are not brought to the fore. Once a defining feature of Canada’s response to juvenile delinquency, the BIC principle has waned in the face of sweeping penal populism. Examples from Scotland, Scandinavia and Washington reveal means by which child-friendly justice systems can withstand the influence of punitive public sentiment. Mirroring such approaches in Canada would require repurposing the deeply engrained concept of proportionality and viewing children’s interests as inherent to advancing public safety.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".