The week in children's rights - 1591

In this issue:

LATEST NEWS AND REPORTS

Extrajudicial killings and inhuman sentencing

There is “credible evidence” that two women and two children executed extrajudicially in Cameroon were killed by government forces. An investigation by Amnesty International has gathered evidence showing that it was Cameroonian soldiers depicted in a video executing the civilians with a comparatively rare Galil rifle, or the very similar Zastava M21. Both the weapons and uniforms of the soldiers in the video are reportedly indicative of the Cameroon army and two of the soldiers on film are named by the person filming the execution. Amnesty has previously documented crimes such as torture by Cameroon’s forces, and an investigation into the incident has now been announced by the government. Despite this, the Ministry of Communication dismissed video footage of the killings as “fake news”.

Media outlets in Iran have published photos of a man who was convicted of consuming alcohol when he was 14 or 15 being publicly flogged. The photos show the man, bound to a tree, receiving the 80-lash sentence as a small crowd watches from a distance. Prosecutors say he was arrested more than ten years ago, and it is not clear why the punishment is being carried out now. More than 100 other offences are punishable by flogging in Iran, including vandalism, defamation and "breach of public morals". In January 2016, the Committee on the Rights of the Child urged Iran to “immediately repeal all provisions which authorize or condone cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of children”. You can learn more about the inhuman sentencing of children in Iran in CRIN’s research here.
 

State violence against children

In Palestine 25 children have been injured and one killed after Israeli forces opened fire on protesters at the fence between Israel and the Gaza Strip. In total 146 people were injured in the incident as Israeli troops reportedly used live ammunition, plastic-coated bullets and tear gas on protesters, journalists and paramedics. According to the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, at least 57 of the injured were hit by live fire. Al Mezan’s documentation shows that on 29 June there were four hours of clashes, with 12-year-old Yaser Abu Al-Naja being shot in the head with a live bullet just before 7pm. Since 30 March of this year Al Mezan has recorded the deaths of 17 children and the injury of 1,380 more in protests.

A ten-year-old has been killed in Nicaragua after pro-government forces launched an operation in the country's south against an opposition stronghold. Government-backed paramilitary forces allegedly started the operation in and around the city of Masaya to clear protesters' barricades, but were met with attacks from homemade bombs and volleys of stones. The Nicaraguan Association for Human Rights reports that six civilians and four riot police officers died on Sunday in and around the city of Masaya, with a 10-year-old girl who was shot in the stomach dying as a result of a lack of medical attention. Protests across the country initially broke out in April over now-scrapped pension reforms and have since expanded into general opposition to President Daniel Ortega and his government. Protesters are demanding the resignation of Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, whom they accuse of establishing a dictatorship characterised by nepotism and brutal repression. More than 280 people, the vast majority of them civilians, have so far been reported killed in the violence.

Several police officers in the Philippines have been relieved of duty after their involvement in an anti-drugs operation left a 4-year-old dead. The boy, later named as Skyler Abatayo, was hit by a stray bullet after a police raid in the city of Cebu escalated into a shootout. Four officers were sent to arrest several suspects reported to be using and packaging drugs for sale, but none were arrested by the police. While tests have confirmed that none of the officers fired the bullet which killed Skyler they are nevertheless under investigation for allowing all four suspects to flee the scene. Abatayo is not the first case of a child caught in the crossfire of an anti-drug operation in the country. On 23 August, 2016, 5-year-old Danica May Garcia was killed by a stray bullet in an anti-drug operation as she was preparing to go to school. The Philippines’ president, Rodrigo Duterte, has previously dismissed such deaths as “collateral damage”.

Bodily integrity and identity

A potential breakthrough has been secured in Afghanistan after an official public health policy was passed requiring doctors to stop carrying out “virginity tests”. Despite promises last year from the Afghan president that forensic virginity tests would be banned, the procedures remain widespread, being carried out in hospitals and clinics across the country. Virginity testing was banned in 2016, but police have continued to pick up girls and women suspected of having sex, taking them to health centres where they are forced to undergo an invasive virginity test. Condemned by the World Health Organization (WHO) as degrading, discriminatory and unscientific, the practice of virginity testing has been widely used to ascertain whether a woman has committed adultery or had sex before marriage. A 2016 Human Rights Watch report found almost half of all women incarcerated in Afghanistan, and 95 percent of girls in juvenile detention, are there for “moral crimes” such as sex before marriage.

Rights activists have rallied against arguments in favour of female genital mutilation (FGM) in Sri Lanka, calling it “a barbaric practice about degrading women's sexuality”. The country’s recent ban on the practice, which came into effect in May this year, has particularly been criticised by members of Sri Lanka's Muslim community who claim the move infringes upon their religious rights. Campaigners against “khatna” - the form of FGM which is performed on young girls in the country - say it can cause psychological, sexual and physical complications, while the UN has labelled all forms of FGM as a violation of women’s and girls’ rights. The government’s decision to ban khatna prohibits doctors from any involvement in the tradition. Human rights lawyer Ermiza Tegal summarised the logic behind the ban, noting that: "Even if some believe it is a religious requirement it does not entitle them to make an irreversible cut on an innocent child's body when a child cannot give informed consent".

Austria’s constitutional court has ruled that people not identifying as male or female should have the right to do so when completing official forms and that sex-assigning surgeries in newborns and children can only be justified in exceptional cases. The court, responding to a request from someone who identifies as intersex, invoked the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to insist that the legislature introduce the option of “other” or “inter” where civil register forms ask a person’s gender. The court stressed in its ruling that Article 8 of the ECHR guarantees the right to “an individual sexual identity” and protects “in particular, people with an alternative sexual identity”. The judgment also added that families’ fears of stigmatisation should never serve as a motivation for intervention into sex development. Last November Germany became the first European nation where the justice system called for the official recognition of a “third sex”, a decision followed in May by the Netherlands. Though some have hailed this as a step forward for LGBT rights, others have claimed that there needs to be an overhaul of the “archaic” systems which require citizens to register “something as personal and intimate as gender/sex”.

Sex education

The first of a new class of sex educators have been certified to teach by the government in China, with more teachers expected to follow in their footsteps in the coming months. Until recently the country provided little, if any, sex education for young people outside of the basics of sexual reproduction. What little education children did receive on consent and relationships focused on preventing sexual assault and, according to associate professor of psychology at Beijing Forestry University, Fang Gang, failed to adequately define healthy relationships. Fang is behind the training of new sex education teachers for China’s middle schools and claims that the new training will include information tailored for children and adults, online videos for family education, and summer and winter campaigns for adolescents. The new material was described by Fang as “empowerment sexuality education”, approaching issues such as gender equality, LGBT rights and feminism, as well as addressing concerns around preventing sexual abuse and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Teachers in Ontario, Canada, may be forced to use a 20-year-old sex education curriculum after the province’s recently elected governor decided to scrap the 2015 syllabus. Businessman turned politicians Doug Ford promised to scrap the 2015 material in his election campaign, at least until consultations are carried out to create a new set of lessons for teaching children about sex, relationships and consent. Teachers are reportedly being told to use teaching material from 1998, but the province’s education minister, Lisa Thompson, told legislators this weekthat not all of the modernized sex-ed curriculum would be dropped. Thompson claimed the new curriculum would still cover consent, cyber safety and gender identity, but later statements from her own office have contradicted this. Around 100 demonstrators gathered in Ottawa to protest the move, with one attendee labelling the move to a decades-old curriculum “horrendous”.

CASE STUDY: Quashing discrimination in age of consent laws

UPCOMING EVENTS

EMPLOYMENT

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