This article explores how the idea of procedural justice can help us to rethink juvenile justice and research children’s rights in Europe differently. To frame the following argument, we will question four implications of the procedural justice perspective: 1) the need to implement rights and not just proclaim them, 2) the need to investigate a ‘double perspective’ on children’s rights implying both juvenile justice professionals and children in conflict with the law, 3) the child’s right to effectively participate and be involved in the process and 4) the idea that age matters in the judicial reaction to crime. The resulting conclusions and discussions revolve around the scientific consequences and challenges we must face when we take procedural justice perspective seriously.

In this article, the authors discuss the preliminary results of a Belgian research on 210 young offenders transferred to Adult Court in 1999, 2000 and 2001. The long-term judicial pathways of these youngsters, now aged between 30 and 40, are explored. Drawing on the criminal records and detention records of the sample, judicial pathways into adulthood are charted. The results show that the greater part of the sample is still involved in the criminal justice system. More than 50 per cent were convicted at some point in the last 3 years, and almost a third of the population is imprisoned. With this quite unfavourable picture of transferred offenders’ future pathways, we hope to reopen the discussion about transfer policies in Belgium.

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