THE GOVERNMENT'S much-ballyhooed anti-drug campaign is triggering
a massive backlash by way of an institutionalized form of human rights
violation against children who get jailed under sub-human conditions
with adult prisoners in police detention cells.
Two 17-year old boys slammed their detention for weeks in a cramped
police jail swarming with adult prisoners upon their arrest by barangay
watchmen for alleged possession of marijuana in Quezon City last July
16.
Subsequently, the duo were charged with violation of Section 11,
Article II of the Comprehensive Drugs Act of 2002 or RA 9165, before
they were finally turned over just recently to the Molave Youth Home,
wherein children facing trial for alleged crimes are detained on court
orders.
In their nine-page motion filed August 12 before Family Court Judge
Natividad Giron-Dizon, the teenagers—through lawyer Perfecto
G. Caparas II—assailed their detention with adult detainees,
while under police custody, for violating national and international
human rights laws.
Jailing children together with adults is a prohibited act under Article
191 of PD 603 (Child and Youth Welfare Code), Section 8 of the Family
Courts Act of 1997 (RA 8369), Section 11 of the Rules on the Apprehension,
Investigation, Prosecution and Rehabilitation of Youth Offenders,
and Article 10.2(b) and 10.3 of the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights.
The latest Supreme Court-enacted Rule on Juveniles in Conflict with
the Law also bans the co-mingling of children with adult inmates,
especially in police jails.
Yet, police child detention—the duo charged—still persists
as “an institutionalized and continuing form of human rights
violation committed by the state with impunity against our voiceless
and powerless children prisoners.”
Their detention “constitutes a brazen violation of the Special
Child Protection Act or RA 7610 penalizing and criminalizing the commission
of any form of cruelty and abuse against children, especially by way
of detaining them in the company of adults, in cramped detention cells.”
The duo assailed the lack of “adequate provisions for food,
clothes, medicine, sanitation, and ventilation” during their
police detention. They were also denied of “direct and immediate
access to health, medical, legal, and social services in contravention
of national and international human rights law,” they complained.
The two teenagers are the latest in a growing list of children getting
arrested and detained in police jails packed with adult inmates under
RA 9165 in Quezon City alone. Before its advent, drug-related cases
under RA 6425 (numbering 262) figured prominently among children’s
cases, ranking third from theft (985) and robbery (902), from 1991
to 2001, according to statistics of the Quezon City Social Services
Development Department that supervises the MYH.
Slapped with a P200,000 bail for their release, the duo pleaded with
the court that they be released immediately instead to the custody
(recognizance) of their parents pending trial. This would help “them
(veer) away from a life of criminality sans their outright detention
behind bars which is inappropriate and unjust given their youth and
considering the availability of alternatives to detention.”
Such early release “would help prevent them from acquiring the
virus of criminal contamination.”
“Even children prisoners have their own sub-culture that has
branched out from the sub-culture of their adult counterparts,”
they averred, citing alleged incidents of beatings, sodomy, tattooing,
and weapons-production among child prisoners.
The youths’ early release would help “serve the ends of
crime prevention and non-recurrence,” they added.
“The principle of proportionality assumes pivotal importance
in the instance case,” they said, citing that the drug menace
“is basically a psychological, emotional, and social problem—requiring
counseling and the provision of basic social services to the youth
especially in the field of education, health, sports, and other wholesome
and clean forms of fun and recreation—that cannot be cured by
the detention of the young.”
“The arrest and detention of children as a matter of judicial
notice more often than not leads to the traumatization, dehumanization,
and criminalization of children,” they stressed.
