Call for Judicial System that doesn’t Jail Children

Rights organizations and trade associations in a joint declaration have criticized plans to build new juvenile prions and asked for change in juvenile judicial system.

“Capacity of each of these new prisons is 288 and that Ministry of Justice aims to create an extra capacity of 1440 for children in three years.”

Call

Rights organizations stating that the ministry doesn’t show necessary effort to ensure the participation of children and NGOs as to works in juvenile judiciary, emphasized that it prefers to build more juvenile prisons instead and criticized this mindset.

“We believe a juvenile judiciary system is possible, which protects and supports children and uses alternative methods as base instead of building new juvenile prisons, and that we are ready to show maximum effort for that purpose! We are expressing that we will be a close follower of it, and we call for political parties and Ministry of Justice to take responsibility”.

Violation of rights in prisons

The statement has included experiences of children and their impacts on them in Turkey.

- Children are exposed to naked body searches.

- They cannot hug, or even touch their parents because of the glass in closed visiting day practice.

- They have to meet all their basic needs including water by buying those from canteen except for three meals a day.

- They might receive penalties such as being suspended for a month on the ground that they didn’t obey prison rules, or locked in room for 21 hours a day during five days.

Data

Rights organizations emphasized failure in juvenile judicial system with a couple of examples.

- 10 children lost their lives as of 2009 in prisons. Lastly, a child hanged himself in Trabzon E-Type Prison on November 13, 2015.

-  According to data in 2011, 68.6 percent of children under 18 are included in judicial system a year after they are released and receive punishment.   

 Examples

“Germany has changed its laws eight times as of 1923 in an effort to ‘seek a better way’ embracing the idea of protecting children and youngsters, and that established a youth judicial system based on the protection of juvenile and youngsters.

“The Netherlands characterized children’s being included in the judicial system as crisis and built a system in which children interact with only social service experts and psychologists.

“Many countries like Germany and the Netherlands are in a struggle for seeking better systems that look after higher interests of children.

“It is not only that Child Protection System in Turkey is not sufficient in terms of protective and preventive services, but the number of juvenile prions that do not obviously look after higher interests of children are gradually increasing”. (YY/TK)

Click here to read the article in Turkish