Amnesty International Decries Governmental Cruelty to Children

Thousands of children, some only infants, are being imprisoned, tortured and killed by governments worldwide, Amnesty International said Tuesday.

“Innocence and vulnerability are no protection against abuses of power by the state,” the London-based human rights organization said in its monthly newsletter. “The most fundamental rights of thousands upon thousands of children are violated in countries all around the world.”

The group, which cited 18 countries in its report, called on its members worldwide to halt political violence against children and to press the United Nations to adopt a Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Some children are tortured to extract information or to force their parents to speak, the organization said.

In an incident prompted by the theft of a rifle, 8-year-old Alberto Alarcon of Ecuador was attacked by soldiers who burst into his home last May, threw him over barbed wire and beat and nearly drowned him by holding his head underwater, the report said.

The document said that Turkish police last year tortured four young boys from southeastern Turkey, where Kurdish separatist rebels are active, with electric shocks in their mouths.

In Suriname, a 3-year-old baby boy was shot to death in his mother’s arms in 1986 by soldiers who apparently wanted to frighten villagers into giving information. A recent international conference in Zimbabwe organized by Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, a British anti-apartheid campaigner, estimated that from 1984 to 1986, 11,000 South African children, some as young as 7, had been detained and most were assaulted while behind bars. More than 1,000 children were wounded and 312 killed by police fire, Amnesty International said, citing the conference report.

Children were beaten with fists, rifle butts or whips, and incidents of attempted strangulation and electric shock torture were reported.

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, children as young as 12 have been arrested, and many said they were punched, kicked and beaten by the Israeli military, the report stated.

More than 100 Argentine children are still missing in the wake of the so-called “dirty war” against suspected subversives in the late 1970s, the report said. Scores of other children have vanished in Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Peru, it added.

The report also cited the case of Noor Jahan of Burma, who was just a year old when she was jailed in Burma with her mother, who was suspected of being an illegal immigrant. Noor is 31 today, is still in jail and has never been charged.

Women and children, the report said, were among more than 200 people killed, some of them execution-style, by Syrian and Syrian-backed troops in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli in 1986.

In Iraq, the report added, about 300 children and young people were arrested in 1985, apparently seized because of the political activities of their relatives. At least 29 were reported to have been executed.

In the United States, children have been sentenced to death and executed for crimes committed when they were as young as 15, despite international human rights standards that prohibit capital punishment for people under 18, the report said.