PULSE - Europe beyond the beat

PULSE is an initiative for cross-border collaborative journalism in Europe

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Sweden is experimenting with programs for 13-year-old offenders

Friday, May 1, 2026

Der Standard

Sweden plans to lower the age of criminal responsibility to 13, despite criticism and prior failures in Denmark.

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[This is an automatically generated summary, for reference only]

Sweden plans to lower the age of criminal responsibility, potentially allowing 13-year-olds to receive prison sentences starting this August. This proposal faces significant opposition from the Swedish legal committee, the bar association, and aid organizations, who argue it contradicts the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Despite the criticism, the conservative government is maintaining its plan, which is currently limited to five years, citing the fight against gang crime in Swedish cities. Meanwhile, in Malmö, a southern Swedish city, criminal gangs are reportedly recruiting young people and young adults.

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PULSE – Europe beyond the beat is an initiative coordinated by OBCT which has been promoting intense journalistic cross-border collaborations in Europe since 2024. The main aim is to help strengthen the European public sphere by reporting and telling stories from new and diverse perspectives.

At the heart of PULSE are 10 leading national news outlets (Delfi – Lithuania, Deník Referendum – Czechia, Der Standard – Austria, EfSyn – Greece, El Confidencial – Spain, Gazeta Wyborcza – Poland, HotNews – Romania, HVG – Hungary, Il Sole 24 Ore – Italy, Mediapool – Bulgaria) and three transnational organisations, including OBCT , n-ost and Voxeurop .

PULSE’s offering also includes the distribution of free content to third-party outlets and the animation of four thematic networks open to any European journalist interested in crucial issues such as EU enlargement, Europe and other global powers, the green transition, or media and information society.

PULSE is driven by a sort of virtual transnational newsroom made up of journalists from all the publications involved, which produces new journalistic content on European issues in a collaborative way on a daily basis, coming in many languages. A further layer of associated partners and journalists enriches PULSE’s editorial output, which amounts to over a thousand publications per year.