Juvenile Court magistrate Jean Pierre Rosenczvieg of Bobigny, a suburb of Paris, discusses efforts to lower the age of criminal responsibility in France from 18 to 16 in this blog post in Le Monde. Rosenczvieg rebuts the proposal by Nikolas Sarkozy, made  as part of his current presidential campaign, pointing to facts that should sound familiar to us here in the US: the crime rate is falling, not rising; there are adequate penal consequences for all ages in existing law; the “super predator” concept of more mature criminals at younger ages has been debunked; and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (of which France is a signatory) prohibits it.