PHILIPPINES
Children in jail: What has happened to
president’s order?
SUPREME Court Justice Reynato S. Puno, in a speech to
the Fourth Annual Conference of the Child Protection Unit Network 10
days ago, said:
“According to the Juvenile Justice Network, 10,515
Filipino children are being arrested and detained each year. The
Philippine Bar Association has reported that 20,000 children are in
jails mixed with hardened criminals. The Save the Children Foundation
also has statistics showing that in 2002, more than half of the children
in Southern Mindanao prisons had been sexually abused and were suffering
from psychological harm. Some girls had been raped and some boys had
been sodomized.”
Last August a CNN report showed videos for the entire
world to see of the grim and savage reality about the way the government
treats our children.
Reacting to the CNN telecast, President Arroyo ordered
the Department of Justice and DILG to immediately correct the
“penological monstrosity” (a term used by a team of UN experts who
visited the Philippines a decade ago) of keeping young offenders in jail
with hardened adult criminals. Young felons, she said magnanimously,
should be kept in special welfare homes.
Justice Secretary Raul M. Gonzalez had derided the CNN
special report. He called it “unfair” and questioned why we Filipinos
“are giving so much credence to what the foreign correspondents say.
They should talk about the child soldiers in Africa, or the child
prostitutes in Thailand.”
In any case, Gonzalez ordered prosecutors not to jail
children suspected of having committed crimes.
But what about the President’s order to save young
offenders from the physical and psychological trauma of being imprisoned
with recidivists and hardened convicts? Have the children been moved out
of the national prisons and municipal jails and transferred to “special
welfare homes”?
Has President Arroyo followed up how her order has
been carried out? The latest information from the justice
department is that most of the young jailed offenders are still where
they are. Why? Because the government doesn’t have the correct
facilities to keep them. Is the President aware of this? And have she,
Gonzalez and everyone concerned with protecting children drawn up a plan
to solve the shortage of decent jails?
Philippine law requires the authorities to commit
offenders below the age of 18 to the custody of the social welfare
department or their parents. Yet, there are 21 minors on death row. Our
authorities are flagrantly violating the law and the Constitution.
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines
presented a study sometime ago by Raymund Narag, a penology consultant
to the Supreme Court, showing that prisoners stay an average of 3.2
years in jail before their cases are finally decided. Inmates have 0.28
square meters of space per person way below the three square meters per
inmate set by the UN’s Minimum Standard for the Treatment of Prisoners.
Prisoners—including children—die from diseases because
of unsanitary conditions. Narag’s study stressed that child offenders
are being kept with adult prisoners under inhumane conditions, an
outrage that have persisted under several administrations.
We hope and pray that the Senate bill to reform our
juvenile justice system becomes law. That law should inaugurate a system
of restorative justice for child offenders, a system that focuses on
reform rather than punishment.
Editorial
17 November 2005
http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2005/nov/17/yehey/opinion/20051117opi1.html
