Human Rights

Memories continue to haunt those who suffered under the brutality of war. Children who witnessed atrocities and were themselves subjected to war crimes will struggle to cope with everyday life. Most live in abject poverty and face a future without prospect. The war these children faced is far from over.

Plan International released a study today that claims two-thirds of war orphans are at a high risk of suicide. Many have contracted HIV/AIDS. The study looked at 1,000 children aged 8 to 16 in six west African countries and revealed a cycle of poverty, prostitution, and sexually transmitted disease.

In Koindu, Sierra Leone, 16 year old Theresa lost her parents during the civil war. She’s been in and out of refugee camps but now lives with her aunt. She sold her body to feed herself and now has a two-year old son. The father is not known.

“I feel like I have no purpose, like there is no meaning to it,” she told IRIN news. “I have no idea who the child’s father is. I have to struggle just to get clothes for us. I beg to eat.”

On June 19, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution 1820 condemning sexual violence against women and girls as a tacit weapon of war that serves to “to humiliate, dominate, instill fear in, disperse and/or forcibly relocate civilian members of a community or ethnic group.” The resolution in itself is a recognition of the culture of impunity that often surrounds the abuse women and girls suffer. However, much is to be done.

Last year, Dr.Yakin Erturk, UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women released a thematic report (see A/HRC/4/34) on how culture based discourse fragment human rights issues facing women as a problem of the “other.” “We don’t need campaigns. We need action,” she says in a openDemocracy podcast.

Erturk says there is an increasing trend to view violence against women as a cultural phenomenon via cultural relativism especially in countries of the south. In the north, she says cultural essentialism promotes an image that violence against women is a problem of the south. These trends diverge from universal human rights standards and should not be categorized as “minority” issues.

Indeed, Theras’ story leads credence to this view.  War, poverty, and the dissolution of social relations are instrumental.

“People have lost their cultural values and their sense of community,” Lawrence James, a councilor who used to work in Koindu, tells IRIN news. He explains the lack of support for war orphans is a consequence of the breakdown of social relations in communities destroyed by war coupled with abject poverty.

Rape and sexual violence orchestrated towards women and girls is often used as tool to rip apart these communities. The former commander of UN peacekeeping troops in eastern Congo, Major-General Patrick Cammaert, says women and girls are specifically targeted to destroy communities.

Child abuse or sexual abuse is an euphemism for what is really happening and has been happening for a very long time.  Let’s just call it what it is - child rape.

The Catholic Church, already having paid out billions of dollars in compensations ($2 billion in the US alone), is having to make some very tough choices.  How much money should one pay for destroying the life of a child all the while maintaining a position of moral superiority?

On Saturday in Australia while addressing the Catholic Church’s World Youth Day in Australia, Pope Benedict XVI made a public apology for the sexual abuse of children by clerics (see International Herald Tribune article here).  The victims were not allowed to attend according to Broken Rites.

Broken Rites, an Australian group that campaigns for the victims of rape by religious authority figures, says 107 Australian priests and clergy (of all denominations) have appeared in courts over sex crimes.

Victims are fighting for compensation but bishops’ lawyers are arguing that the Catholic Church cannot be sued because it does not exist as a legal entity according to Broken Rites website.

The Pope has yet to apologize for how his Australian bishops deliberately covered up these crimes. In 2003, Cardinal George Pell, the Catholic Church’s archbishop in Sydney, wrote a letter to an accuser and dismissed his claim of sexual abuse leveled against a priest.

Pell argued that no similar accusations were made against the priest.  It later turned out that Pell had indeed received a similar accusation from another victim directed toward the same priest. Pell claimed that his letter was badly worded and was not trying to cover up the crime.

Last May, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili signed into law a set of three amendments lowering the age of criminal responsibility from 14 to 12 in direct contravention to UN recommendations.  Children committing major crimes will be tried as adults.

Major crimes include premeditated murder, intentional damage to health, rape, most types of robbery, and possession of knives.  According to a United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child report, a Georgian representative said the implementation of the law would not go into effect until juvenile detention centers were constructed.  This report was dated May 26, 2008.

A month later, on June 25, 2008 I asked Georgia’s current Prime Minister Vladimer (Lado) Gurgenidze to comment on the law.    This is what he had to say…

Dear all, I’m on freelance assignment in Georgia.  I managed to interview Georgia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Gurgenidze and asked him to explain why Georgia passed legislation that lowers the minimum age of criminal responsibility to 12. 

Human Rights Watch (HWR) issued a report earlier this month and made an appeal to the Georgian government to rescind this controversial legislation.  On June 6, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Child expressed “deep regret” and urged Georgia to increase the age to 14.

“Rather than making plans to lock up 12-and 13-year-olds, the Georgian government should study best international practice on addressing and preventing crime by children. It should develop social support and other preventive services appropriate to Georgia’s culture and conditions and to its responsibilities,” said Mary Murphy, director of Penal Reform International’s South Caucasus Office

The Prime Minister’s response was unequivocal and he deferred the question to the Ministry of Justice.  He would not offer an opinion on the matter either.  I recorded the entire interview and if I manage to overcome some technical glitches, I’ll post this segment online.

Since the 2003 Rose Revolution, Georgia has made remarkable progress.  It has restored its financial order, fought corruption, crime, and made sweeping economic reforms that are transforming this tiny nation of 4.6 million.  As you may know, Georgia is currently embroiled in a tense conflict over its breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.  However, this is an altogether different story and probably doesn’t belong in this blog.

“If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job,” an American official told the Washington Post. This was in relation to an article on CIA torture of al-Qaida and Taliban suspects at the Bagram Air Force in 2002. Two unarmed civilians were captured and tortured to death by the CIA in December of that year.

In 2006, Sgt. Joshua Claus along with 14 other US officials and personnel at the base were charged with assault and “maltreatment of a detainee.” They received five-month sentences. Sixteen-year old Mohamed Jawad was at the receiving end of their abuse. “When I was in detention at Bagram, Americans killed three people. They beat people and arrested us without trial. We’re not given any rights,” Jawad told Col. Ralph Kohlmann, a judge at the proceedings.

And now last week the US Department of Justice released a report (doc) to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. It reveals that since 2002, 90 children have been detained at Bagram. Today, there are currently ten - classified as “unlawful enemy combatant ” - a perverse syllogism to circumvent Geneva Convention IV (confinement of civilians).

Bagram “houses” some 630 prisoners, three times as many as Guantanamo. An International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report released earlier this year says Bagram is rife with massive overcrowding and abhorrent conditions. Isolated cells were also discovered and the ICRC says some prisoners are held in a secret detention center known as the “salt pit.”

According to International Justice Network Litigation Director and Stanford Human Rights Professor Barbara Olshansky, “International law and practice clearly prohibits holding children in such terrible and terrifying prisons, and there does not appear to be any legitimate purpose for holding these children without access to their families or lawyers.”