Bridging Law and Practice: Implementation Challenges of the Children Act 2013 in Bangladesh

The Children Act, 2013 represents the most ambitious legislative effort in Bangladesh's history to reform the juvenile justice system. Enacted to replace the inadequate Children Act, 1974, the legislation draws directly from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1989) and the Beijing Rules (1985), embedding principles of proportionality, rehabilitation, and the best interests of the child into domestic law. Its provisions, spanning child-friendly courts, diversion mechanisms, probation supervision, and Child Development Centres, were designed to dismantle the punitive apparatus that had long governed the treatment of children in conflict with the law. Yet more than a decade since its enactment, the Act's transformative potential remains substantially unrealized. This article examines the persistent and interconnected obstacles that prevent the law from functioning as intended. Drawing on doctrinal legal analysis, policy review, empirical observation, and comparative insights from analogous South Asian jurisdictions, it argues that the implementation gap is not incidental but structural, rooted in institutional fragility, chronic underfunding, attitudinal resistance, and the absence of robust accountability systems. The article concludes with a five-pillar reform agenda, grounded in evidence and tailored to the administrative realities of Bangladesh, to move the juvenile justice system from legislative aspiration toward functional child-centered justice.