Top experts warns northeast Syria ‘world’s largest detention site for children’
Anjali Sharma
GG News Bureau
UNITED NATIONS, 24th Oct. UN human rights experts on Monday said that “Egregious” child rights violations are taking place in camps and prisons across northeast Syria, where the “vast majority” of those detained are children.
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the UN Special Rapporteur for the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, said that in the infamous Al-Hol and Al-Roj camps as well as a number of other detention facilities, “no process of law exists to justify detention” and “torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment is rife”.
They said displacement camps in northeast Syria hold tens of thousands of Syrians, Iraqis and nationals of other countries suspected of links to the terror group Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.
The expert’s latest report documents enforced disappearances, torture, ill-treatment and incommunicado detention at the sites.
The findings include mass arbitrary separation of pre-pubescent and adolescent boys from their mothers in the camps.
The expert considered it “particularly harmful”, as well as “rampant starvation and tuberculosis” occurring in Panorama prison, which holds approximately 5,000 men and 700 boys.
Ms. Ní Aoláin said that the “scale, scope and extent of these practices may reach the threshold for crimes against humanity under international law” and warned that it was “morally and legally unacceptable to use ‘terrorism’ to justify egregious breaches of human rights”.
