PHILIPPINES OPINION

Children in dungeons

Some three decades have passed since the passage in 1974 of the Child and Youth Welfare Code mandating the segregation of detention facilities for children from adult prisoners.
Sadly, there has been almost nothing in terms of actual enforcement of this law.

In 1992 the Special Protection for Children Against Child Abuse, Exploitation and Discrimination Act decreed the criminalization of persons responsible for any condition detrimental to the child’s development. But police crusades against children and judicial detention of children continue on a massive scale in absolute disregard of international humanitarian laws. Nobody has been held accountable for these deleterious conditions to which government has condemned child vagrants.
“Death row,” the movie produced by Butch Jimenez, even portrayed the inhumanity of a criminal justice system wherein children are cruelly treated as adults, whether in court or prisons. Several award-winning French journalists, particularly TF1’s Patrick Charles-Messance, M6’s Laurent Lesage and Paris Match’s Gilles Trichard, have even filmed several documentaries on Filipino children inside death row, death chambers, city jails and courtrooms.
The government remained shamelessly indifferent as it still remains today.

Two years ago, a child-rights advocate, in his frustration over children continuously being detained by law enforcers with impunity, assisted five child detainees in filing criminal complaints against the country’s top officials for crimes against humanity. Atty. Perfecto Caparas argued that incarceration of children with adult prisoners is so inhumane that domestic laws are not even needed to define the crime committed because the whole world condemns the repulsiveness of jailing toddlers with the country’s most heinous criminals.
Unfortunately, Deputy Ombudsman Vicente Fernandez, a defense counsel of convicted pedophile and rapist legislator Congressman Romeo Jalosjos, dismissed the complaint.
The dismissal failed to present any profound or intelligent analysis of the arguments clearly articulated in the Caparas pleadings.

Last year, even Princess Caroline of Monaco visited President Arroyo, in a low-profile dialogue (so as not to embarrass the President), to convince her to push for change within the criminal justice system. The Philippine Chapter of the World Association of Children’s Friends, an international organization led by the Princess of Hanover, questioned not only the failure of the government to segregate minors from adult offenders but the very structure of the criminal justice system and its applicability to minors.
We have been pushing not just for child segregation but for all children below 18 years old not to even be handled by police, prosecutors, or judges. Children should not even be indicted before courts, where administrative inefficiency results in service of sentence during detention even if the accused child is subsequently found innocent.
Because of presidential commitments to Princess Caroline, I prepared a draft executive order, upon request of the Social Welfare secretary, in response to the dilemma of children caught within the criminal justice Web. Believing in the President’s sincerity, I drafted a General Amnesty Proclamation to benefit all children accused of criminal offenses before the police, prosecution, or courts. Because a stronger rehabilitative intervention was necessary for children facing charges of heinous crimes, we specifically excluded such category from amnesty’s blanket coverage.
Two government agencies blocked passage of the blanket amnesty.
Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez claimed that amnesty cannot apply to children already indicted in court. The Council for the Welfare of Children, which believes that 12-year-old children should be held criminally liable, questioned the approach of a general amnesty for children and demanded its submission for further deliberations among interested parties of the legal community.

Even as the legal community glamorizes the pillars of the criminal justice system, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, in its recent report in the Philippines, has clearly expressed its serious concern about the lack of child-sensitive and adequately trained juvenile courts.
It further demanded the sovereign guaranty that deprivation of liberty for minors is used only as a measure of last resort, and not as an immediate intervention to children in conflict with law. If detention is deemed necessary, it should be for the shortest possible time; not for two to six months awaiting arraignment; not for four to five years of trial wherein children would have served sentence beyond the prescribed penalty.
The UN committee further mandated that any detained child must be provided with appropriate conditions, which means privacy, proper sanitation, nutritious food and clean water, and with education for them to become constructive citizens. Filipino children should not be sodomized in jail, tortured, detained for vagrancy and status offenses, or dehumanized and forgotten within the fetid, fecal and smelly dungeons.
But these are the realities not just tolerated but inflicted by our government upon these children.

Fifty-two thousand jailed children, not just 20,000 as reported by CNN, are abused on a daily basis.
Unless our government acts now, these children represent 52,000 potential hardened criminals who will engage in plunder, corruption, ransom-kidnapping, drug trafficking, pedophilia and serial rapes, and mass murders.

If President Arroyo sincerely believes in redeeming these children, she can always sign the draft Amnesty Proclamation, which has been on her table for almost a year now.

Eric F. Mallonga
22 August 2005

http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2005/aug/22/yehey/opinion/20050822opi2.html

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