Juvenile delinquents have always been of special interest to legal practitioners and scholars
of law and law-related disciplines such as criminology striving to determine how they should
be protected by law. Enacting a differentiated law in both substantive and procedural criminal
law can be the first step in protecting them. If juvenile substantive criminal law as the
normative section of criminal justice is defective then justice cannot be recovered by means
of procedural criminal law and through due process. Furthermore in recent decades respect for
basic rights of juveniles and the importance of criminological research in this field have
become major themes in international discourse initiating a movement toward the recognition
and implementation of common minimum standards of juvenile justice. Germany has recognized
these international standards and Iran has recently paid more attention to such measures in
the formulation of its juvenile justice rules. Due to a number of clashes between Islamic Law
customary law and international obligations however Iran has not yet found a definite
integrative strategy for the treatment of juvenile delinquents. The theoretical part of this
book investigates - historically and comparatively - the criminal law governing juvenile
delinquency in Iran Germany and the United Nations. It introduces a model for reforming the
structure of Iran's juvenile criminal law which has lost touch with the country's social
realities. The empirical part of this study analyzes the public attitudes of the elites toward
juvenile justice in Iran which generally prove to be supportive of international standards.
