Alert: Protest in solidarity with Palestinian child prisoners & hunger strikers

Palestinian Prisoners Campaign Group, 15 September 2012

Join us on Saturday 15th September 2012 at 4pm outside the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) to demand the FCO act on the findings of the report by the delegation of British lawyers on the treatment of Palestinian children under Israeli military law which the FCO commissioned.

The report published in June 2012, even with its narrow remit, concluded that Israel is in breach of articles 2, 3, 37(b), 37(c), and 37(d) of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). The manner of arrest and detention of children amounts to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment which is prohibited in article 37(a) of the UNCRC, and its routine holding of children in solitary confinement for substantial periods of time amounts to torture.

So far the FCO has ignored the report and continues to do business with Israel as normal.

Israel currently holds 220 Palestinian children in its dungeons. There is widespread evidence of routine sexual assaults by interrogators on children who are shackled. They are threatened with rape or sodomy with an object in order to coerce false confessions and coerce them in to becoming informers on their families.

We are calling on the government to sanction Israel to release all the children and returned them to their families.

We will also be visiting the headquarters of the British Red Cross to hand a letter demanding it uphold its responsibilities to Palestinian prisoners and to act to save the lives of hunger strikers Samer al-Barq, Hassan Safadi and Ayman Sharawna.

Palestinian Prisoners Campaign Group
www.inminds.com/caged