Manchester Palestine Solidarity Campaign present:
Discussion meeting: Friends Meeting House Mount Street Manchester
On: Palestinian Political Child Prisoners
Speaker: Victoria Brittain
Former Associate Foreign Editor of the Guardian and Research Associate for the LSE’s ‘Crisis States Program’, she is a tireless campaigner for human rights throughout the developing world. She has written that ‘there is no excuse for not knowing the truth about what is happening to the Palestinians’, and herself speaks and writes regularly to publicise the true situation in Palestine and press for academic, cultural and trade boycotts of Israel. She was a founder member in 2008 of the Palestine Festival of Literature, and she appears frequently at other cultural events in aid of Palestine. She was co-author with Moazzam Begg of Enemy Combatant, One Man’s Journey to Guantánamo and Back, and compiled the play Guantánamo with Gillian Slovo.
Palestinian child political prisoners are arrested and detained illegally by Israel. These children face: the use of torture during interrogation; denial of the right to education while in prison; denial of family and lawyer visits; and the incarceration of Palestinian child political prisoners alongside Israeli juvenile criminal prisoners.
Israel is in violation of International Law which states:
WHEREAS the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), to which Israel is a State Party, outlines in Article 37 that detention or imprisonment of a child shall be in conformity with the law and shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time.;
WHEREAS Article 37 of the CRC states that, Every child deprived of liberty shall be treated with humanity and a respect for the inherent dignity of the human person, and in a manner which takes into account the needs of persons of his or her age.;
WHEREAS the CRC, the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and other international treaties explicitly forbid the use of torture during interrogation and incarceration;
Come and discuss with Victoria Brittain the horrific treatment of Palestinian Children by Israel and what we can do to stop this continuing abuse of children