Submitted by crinadmin on
HRW's summary of the publication
At least eighteen million children live or work on the streets of
India, laboring as porters in railway stations or bus terminals, as
ragpickers, and as vendors of food, tea, or handmade articles.
These street children are routinely subjected to arbitrary and
illegal detention, torture, and extortion, and on occasion, murder
at the hands of police who engage in these violations of
international and Indian law with impunity. Based on interviews
with more than one hundred children during a one-month
investigation in India, this report details police abuse and killings
of street children in Bangalore, Bombay, Madras, New Delhi, and
the state of Andhra Pradesh. Human Rights Watch calls on the
Indian government to put an immediate end to police violence
against street children, to prosecute the police concerned, to
implement the recommendations of the National Police
Commission, to ratify the United Nations Convention against
Torture, and to invite the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and
the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to India to
investigate police mistreatment of street children.