Human Rights Committee - Philippine Center for Investigative ...

‣ Appeals to the officialdom can be found even in the official website of the Office
of the President, as follows:
Eliminate DSWD, BJMP red tape to divert kids from adult police jails, Arroyo
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• (3347 bytes)
Posted: 9/19/2005 • 11:36 GMT+8
Quote-reply
By:
perfecto
registered: 8/24/2005
member
Philippines
The statement of Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita vowing to pull out all
children languishing with adult crime suspects in cramped city and municipal
jails and turn them over to the care of the Department of Social Welfare and
Development is welcomed by the Coalition to Stop Child Detention Through
Restorative Justice. This attempts to answer the legitimate clamor by all
sectors of society for the government to stop this institutionalized crime of
lumping up children with adult prisoners, victimizing thousands of children
belonging mostly to the poorest of the poor.
In order to weed out this barbarity permanently, we urge the President to deoperationalize
the bureaucratic requirement of DSWD and the Bureau of Jail
Management and Penology for a court-issued commitment order before
admitting children to their custody. Instead, DSWD, and to some extent,
BJMP – where appropriate facilities for children exist – should be ordered by
the President to immediately admit children upon their arrest even without
such court orders.
This approach would effectively divert and save children from being
incarcerated with adult crime suspects in police headquarters, stations, and
sub-stations, where they risk getting sodomized, raped, tortured, and
tattooed on a national scale.
The usual practice is for the police to lock up children, upon arrest, over
extended periods in filthy police cells swarming with adult crime suspects all
over the country, save for Cebu City, while awaiting orders from backlogridden
courts to commit the children to BJMP custody. For its part, however,
DSWD generally admits only children with a suspended sentence – also by
virtue of court orders – after having been found guilty by family courts.
This bureaucratic technicality being followed by DSWD and BJMP is the
reason cited by law enforcers in routinely condemning children to rot with
adult crime suspects in police dungeons. The President should decisively
eradicate this ghastly police practice by directing the police to immediately
turn over children to DSWD and/or BJMP, and for the latter to admit the
children to their custody, without exemption, even in the absence of court
orders. By simply casting this DSWD and BJMP bureaucratism into oblivion
in favor of the best interests of child prisoners, the President would be able
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