UN raps US cruelty to child prisoners
UN experts on child rights have criticized US over detention of juveniles in Afghanistan and Iraq and voiced concern about cruel treatment.
He isn’t a criminal, but just the sight of a police officer terrifies 14-year-old Omar. The boy was released last month from an Iraqi prison, after being detained there for more than seven months. “They arrested me because they said I was a suspect after a car bomb exploded in a road near my home and resulted in the killing of an American,” Omar explains. He happened to be near the explosion and was arrested along with adult Iraqis suspected of the attack. Omar was one of 450 detainees who were let out of the two Iraqi and US-run prisons on 27 June, under a national reconciliation plan aimed at bringing insurgents into the political process and ending the bloodshed in Iraq. Although Omar was falsely arrested, dozens of other children have been imprisoned for their roles in attacks, or because poverty turned them to crime, according to reports from local and international groups and the news media in the past three years. Omar said the experience of being in prison was terrifying, “and I was crying day and night for my family.” The trauma of the experience remains with him: “I would rather die than go there again”…
|
They also called for an end to recruitment of under-18s into the US armed forces and for a halt to enlistment campaigns aimed specifically at young people from minority groups and poor or single-parent families.
The strictures were issued in a report from the 18-member Committee on the Rights of the Child, which monitors performance under UN pacts, including two signed by Washington on children and armed conflict and on child prostitution.
On under-18s — defined by the UN as children — held in US-run prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, the committee said it was “concerned over reports indicating the use of cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.”
The 18 experts, nominated by governments but expected to be independent of them, said they had similar reports on abuse of young prisoners held for several years at the US naval base in Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay.
They declared themselves “seriously concerned that children who were recruited or used in armed conflict, rather than being considered primarily as victims, are classified as ‘unlawful enemy combatants’,” and face military tribunals at the base.
The American Council for Civil Liberties (ACLU), which made a presentation of its own to the committee, said the report made clear that the United States was breaking global agreements on children in war.
“The message from the U. N. Committee…. leaves no doubt that US policies and practices violated universal standards aimed at protecting suspected foreign child soldiers from unlawful treatment and prolonged incarceration,” it said.
The United States was also failing to protect its own young citizens “from abusive military recruitment,” said ACLU human rights program director Jamil Dakwar in a statement sent to Reuters.
June 8th, 2008 | Category: Detainee, Minor
| 
Print This Post
| Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL
