Palestine News Network (PNN) : "Special military courts for Palestinian children created to bolster Israeli image "

Special military courts for Palestinian children created to bolster Israeli image

26.09.09 - 11:40

Gaza / PNN – The decision of the Israeli administration to try Palestinian children in separate courts is an attempt to remove a stain from the image of the occupying forces, says Nasser Ferwana.

The Palestinian prisoners advocate and official said today that by continuing to keep children, the Israeli authorities are illustrating a lack of formal change, and certainly not fundamental change.

The Israeli government has received heat from the Palestinian and international communities for its imprisonment of Palestinian children. In attempting to rectify its image, the Israelis are creating special military courts to deal only with Palestinian children, of which there are 326 in prison.

“The fundamental rights of childhood are being violated,” says Ferwana. “At the same time of trying to spruce up its image, the occupation continues to impose psychological, physical and social damages on children. They suffer not only by illegal detention, without proper charge or trial, the military courts do not take into account their childhood.”

Ferwana made the lion’s share of his remarks on the subject in a report that began circulating Saturday.

Beginning on the twenty-third of August 2009 the Israeli administration issued Military Order Number 1644.

The prisoners’ rights official in the PA said, “The decision to establish special courts for children is a decision that has come too late. It was required to begin at the beginning of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, accompanied by legal and judicial procedures to take into account the rights of children, and respect for their special needs on the basis of international covenants and conventions.”

He said that the new program does not deliver any real change, one that must take place upon the moment of arrest. The occupying administration has 12 and 13 year olds in its custody.

Ferwana notes that the children’s court intends to be no different from its predecessors. The youngest age remains 12 years old for military court and at 16 the child is then considered an adult. This is unlike international law that considers the legal age being 18 years.

Violations of human rights standards are serious, he said Saturday.

“Those standards include to not be subjected to arbitrary arrest, to have the right to not be subjected to torture, to not have words invoked and extracted under torture, to have the right to meet freely with counsel, the right to humane conditions of detention, independence of the judiciary, etc.”

Ferwana added, “These standards have not been in place and are not in place under the new children’s court.”

Since 1967 the occupying Israeli forces have kept tens of thousands of Palestinian children in its prisons and detention centers. Of that high number, some 7,800 Palestinian children have been arrested since the beginning of the Al Aqsa Intifada on 28 September 2000.

Of the 326 Palestinian kids currently in Israeli prisons, 92 are in Megiddo and 63 are in Ramon. The others are distributed throughout the other prisons.

 

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