The week in children's rights - 1553

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LATEST NEWS AND REPORTS

Inhuman sentencing

A 17-year-old boy is at risk of imminent execution in Iran after being convicted of rape and murder. In January this year the country’s Supreme Court upheld Amirhossein Pourjafar’s two death sentences, and said in its final verdict that the sentences were issued after taking into account “societal expectations and public opinion”. Rights groups are calling for his execution to be halted and for his sentence to be commuted to one of imprisonment. Pourjafar is scheduled to be executed in a prison in Tehran on 19 October. Magdalena Mughrabi, Deputy Middle East and North Africa Director at Amnesty International said: “The authorities’ rush to send a child to the gallows in order to placate public anger is short-sighted and misguided. The death penalty is a cruel, inhuman and irreversible punishment,” adding that the sentence for those under 18 is banned under international human rights law. The execution was scheduled just two months after the head of Iran’s judiciary, Ayatollah Sadeq Larijani, repeated Iran’s untruthful claims that it does not execute minors. Amnesty International has recorded the execution of 85 juvenile offenders in Iran between 2005 and 2017, including four so far this year. The organisation has also identified 92 individuals who are currently on death row for crimes committed when they were children.
 

Discrimination

Several children have been jailed and were reportedly forced to pay bribes to secure their freedom amid a crackdown against LGBT people in Burundi. Police announced a “hunt” for LGBT individuals on 6 October, informing the media that ‘“several” had already been arrested. Jean-Daniel Ndikumana, an LGBT rights campaigner from Burundi, now working as the head of a LGBTI asylum project in Belgium, explained that he feared police carried out the arrests after finding videos of men dancing together which had been posted on Facebook. Ndikumana explained that police had handcuffed seven people on 4 October, two days before announcing the crackdown. The country’s government has previously claimed that homosexuality “is against Burundian culture”, while President Pierre Nkurunziza enforced a ban on homosexuality in Burundi’s Penal Code in 2009.

Ethnic Uyghur women and children in China’s Xinjiang region are being forced to carry out heavy labour, according to Radio Free Asia (RFA). Anonymous sources claimed that, with many Uyghur men being sent to re-education camps, women and children are being pressed into jobs such as harvesting cotton by hand to support their households. Since April, thousands of Uyghurs accused by the government of harbouring “extremist” and “politically incorrect” views have been detained in a vast network of camps in Xinjiang, where Uyghurs complain of pervasive ethnic discrimination and religious and cultural repression under Chinese rule. Officials reportedly told RFA that authorities are also detaining Uyghur men for travelling overseas where they are “influenced by extremism and other things,” refusing to free them until they admit it was “wrong” to have left the country.

The Canadian government has spent more than $110,000 in legal fees to avoid paying for an indigenous child’s $6,000 orthodontic treatment. Josey Willier, 16, suffers chronic pain in her lower gums as a result of impacted teeth and a severe overbite and has been on painkillers every day for the past two years. An orthodontist recommended braces to avoid invasive jaw surgery, but Health Canada, the department responsible for national public health care, denied an application and three appeals by Willier’s mother to pay for the treatment under the First Nations and Inuit health benefit programme. Health services for First Nations people living on reserves are funded almost entirely by the federal government, and while dental care is often excluded, orthodontic treatments are fully covered when deemed “medically necessary”. The department determined Willier’s case “fell short” after it consulted with four orthodontists of its own choosing, none of whom examined the girl. Sarah Clarke, the lawyer representing the girl pro bono, said the health programme is fundamentally flawed because departmental approval is not based on a child's level of suffering. The case is now being dealt with at a federal court, and a decision is expected in May 2018.  

Refugees

As many as 400 unaccompanied refugee children who claim to have relatives in the United Kingdom are trapped in France, where their asylum cases are not being actively considered, human rights lawyers have said in a new report. More than 900 unaccompanied, asylum-seeking children were allowed into the UK from Europe in 2016, according to the UK Home Office, which disputes that asylum applications have stalled. But the Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales (BHRC) says that poorly handled family reunion cases dating from when the Calais “Jungle” camp was demolished last year has left these children stranded. The BHRC says age assessments were “arbitrary and discriminatory”, in many cases based on physical appearance alone. Two officials from the organisation which conducted assessments on teenage migrants said that “children who had identity documents were being expelled from the queue if their appearance did not fit”. The BHRC also said that children were not given the opportunity to challenge age assessments which put them over the age of 18, and that restrictions imposed by French officials on lawyers, stopping them from giving advice to refugees, compounded the children’s problems.

Cameroon’s military has tortured, assaulted, and sexually abused Nigerian asylum seekers, including children, in remote border areas, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW). UN monitoring partners also previously found that soldiers have forcibly deported 100,000 refugees since 2015, and denied many access to the UN refugee agency. The military’s actions are an apparent effort to stem the spread of the Nigerian militant Islamist group Boko Haram, says HRW. Sixty-one asylum seekers were interviewed for the report, with testimonies claiming soldiers accused them of belonging to Boko Haram or being “Boko Haram wives”. Some said that ill, weak and hungry children died during or just after the deportations, and others said children were separated from their parents. One refugee said that Cameroonian soldiers shouted “Go and die in Nigeria” as they were rounded up at the border and deported. The forced deportations breach the principle of non-refoulement, which bans the return of refugees if their return means they would face persecution or situations of generalised violence. Nigeria is also complicit in the unlawful deportations, after it sent military vehicles over the border in June 2017 to help Cameroon deport almost 1,000 refugees.

Sexual abuse 

The Supreme Court of India has found that the marital exemption to rape is unconstitutional where the victim is under the age of 18, making it possible to prosecute husbands who have sex with their child brides. Before the decision, it was not possible for a husband to be prosecuted for rape if his wife was older than 15, even though the age of sexual consent is 18 in India. The country banned child marriage in 2006 and passed a law criminalising a broad range of sexual offences against children in 2012, which allow for the prosecution of husbands who commit other sexual offences against their wives, but the marital rape exemption was retained. An estimated 23 million child brides live in India, with 47 percent of girls in the country having married before their 18th birthday and 18 percent before their 15th between 2008 and 2014. The case does not affect the law for men who rape their adult wives, but activists have expressed hope that the case will ease the path to repealing the marital rape exemption entirely.

The UN Mission in the Central African Republic (CAR) has received another allegation that a child has been sexually abused by peacekeepers, with the crime alleged to have taken place in Bambari, a town in the centre of the country. The UN Office of Internal Oversight Services has launched an inquiry into the report to verify information and preserve evidence, but the case will be referred to the accused peacekeeper’s home country, which is responsible for prosecuting offences committed by soldiers it has contributed to peacekeeping forces. Reports of sexual abuse committed by peacekeepers in the country first emerged in 2014 when the then Director of Field Operations at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights passed a report on child sexual abuse committed by French peacekeepers to authorities. Since the revelations, the UN has been criticised for failing to prevent abuse and hold perpetrators to account. The UN appointed Jane Connors as its first Victims’ Rights Advocate last month, tasking her with developing mechanisms and policies for victims and witnesses to file complaints.
 

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