USA: Children among those held in Guant�namo Bay - news.amnesty (original) (raw)

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11/20/2003

"Despite their age, these are very dangerous people. They may be juveniles, but they're not on a little-league team..., they're on a major league team, and it's a terrorist team." - General Richard B. Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 25 April 2003.

A long way from home, isolated from their families in a distant location, with no knowledge of their future. On International Children's Day, Amnesty International once again reminds the president of the United States, George W Bush, that there are still children detained at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay. In April 2003 the US authorities revealed that children as young as 13 were among the foreign nationals detained there. As far as Amnesty International is aware, none has been released, despite Secretary of State Powell's reported concern six months ago about the damage their detention was inflicting on the USA's international reputation.

This is the same government which in 2002 told the UN General Assembly Special Session on Children that the USA was "the global leader in child protection". The USA, along with Somalia, is the only country in the world which has not ratified the Convention of the Child (CRC). The United States is also almost the only country left in the world that executes child offenders -- those under 18 at the time of the crime -- accounting for three quarters of such internationally illegal executions known worldwide in the past five years. Another child offender, Raul Villarreal, is scheduled for execution in Texas in June 2004. Lee Malvo, accused of a crime committed when he was 17, is currently on trial for his life in Virginia. He was transferred from federal to Virginia custody on the order of Attorney General John Ashcroft, specifically so that the death penalty would be an option in his case.

A released prisoner told Amnesty International in May 2003 that he recalled speaking to a 12-year-old boy detainee in Guant�namo. One child, Canadian national Omar Khadr, was already known to have been in US custody for almost a year, half of it in Guant�namo Bay, where he was transferred in October 2002. He was reported to have been 15 years old when he was captured in Afghanistan in July 2002. He, along with the other detainees, has been denied access to lawyers or relatives. Likewise, they have had no access to any court or tribunal in which to challenge the lawfulness of their detention or to have their status determined. Omar Khadr and others could yet face trial by military commission, executive bodies with the power to hand down death sentences against which there would be no right of appeal to any court.

The Pentagon appears to define child detainees in the Guant�namo context as those who are under 16 years old. In a response to letter from Amnesty International, it stated that "there are a very small number of the detainees whom we have assessed to be under the age of 16. It is difficult to determine the exact age for the detainees, as birth records are not readily available".

The detention and interrogation of unrepresented children in Guantanamo, as well as contravening international law and standards that apply to both adults and children, violate principles reflecting a broad international consensus that the vulnerability of under-18-year-olds require special protection.

Amnesty International wrote to the US Government on 24 April 2003 calling for clarification on how many under-18-year-olds were being held in Guantanamo and for them to be granted immediate access to lawyers, families and to be charged and adjudicated in accordance with internationally-agreed principles of juvenile justice, or released. The organization pointed out that the definition of "child" according to most international legal standards is anyone under the age of 18.

The USA has ratified the Optional Protocol to the CRC on the involvement of children in armed conflict. According to Article 6(3), if the children in Guant�namo are being held because they participated in the armed conflict in Afghanistan, as the Pentagon has suggested, the USA has a treaty obligation to provide them with "all appropriate assistance for their physical and psychological recovery and their social reintegration". Detaining children in prolonged military custody in Guant�namo Bay cannot meet this obligation.

To mark Children's Day, Amnesty International is focussing on a number of human rights issues involving children around the world.
For more information, please visit our Children's Day 2003 special feature - http://web.amnesty.org/pages/childrensday-index-eng
Credit copyright to Amnesty International if using any of these photographs