未成年人犯罪记录封存制度的司法实践困境与出路

Judicial Practice Dilemmas and Solutions of the Juvenile Criminal Record Sealing System

摘要: 未成年人犯罪记录封存制度的核心功能，在于削弱既往犯罪记录对未成年人未来生活的持续影响，并保障其再社会化的权利。我国现行制度已经完成从地方探索到国家立法确认的转变，但在司法实践中，制度效果并不稳定。问题集中表现为封存效力边界不清，诉讼评价标准不明，适用范围与程序设计过于机械，查询例外过宽，外部制度冲突持续存在，以及数字时代下封存目的难以真正实现。现有研究对此已有较充分讨论，但相关论证仍多停留在条文解释等方面，对于制度困境的整体生成逻辑和体系化回应仍有研究空间。本文认为，未成年人犯罪记录封存制度应当被理解为一项以未成年人特别保护为价值基础、以限制查询和阻断一般犯罪附随后果为核心内容的制度。此项制度完善的关键，不在于抽象地把“封存”变为“消灭”，而在于在风险社会的治理语境中，重新校准犯罪记录的社会功能，明确封存后的诉讼效力，重构程序闭环，并通过配套制度协调与数字治理嵌入，使封存制度真正完成从形式保密到实质去标签化的转换。

Abstract: The core function of the system for sealing juvenile criminal records is to mitigate the enduring impact of past criminal records on juveniles’ future lives and to safeguard their right to resocialization. In China, the current regime has moved from local experimentation to nationwide legislative recognition; yet its effects in judicial practice remain unstable. The main problems are manifested in unclear boundaries of sealing effectiveness, indeterminate standards for litigation-related assessment, overly rigid eligibility and procedural design, excessively broad exceptions to access, persistent conflicts with external regulatory regimes, and the difficulty of genuinely realizing the purpose of sealing in the digital age. Although existing scholarship has offered relatively sufficient discussion, much of it still remains at the level of textual interpretation, leaving further room for research on the overall logic through which these difficulties are generated and on a systematic response. This article argues that the sealing of juvenile criminal records should be understood as a special protective arrangement grounded in the value of heightened protection for juveniles, with restricting access and blocking the collateral consequences of ordinary criminal records as its core content. The key to improving the regime does not lie in abstractly replacing “sealing” with “erasure”, but rather in, within the governance context of a risk society, recalibrating the social functions of criminal records, clarifying the litigation effects of sealed records, reconstructing a closed procedural loop, and—through coordination of supporting institutions and the embedding of digital governance—enabling the regime to complete a shift from formal confidentiality to substantive de-labeling.