Human Rights Committee - Philippine Center for Investigative ...

During police detention, law enforcers routinely lock up child prisoners with adult
crime suspects in cramped police jails. The children lack access to psychosocial, health,
and legal services during police custody.
Their jail conditions are horrible. They lack adequate ventilation and sanitation
facilities. They sleep on the cold pavement without provisions. They only survive
through the food brought by relatives of some prisoners which all the inmates share
among themselves.
Being of tender age, the children get maltreated and abused by the police and
adult inmates who order them, for instance, to clean the toilet. They are also made to
sleep under the worst conditions inside cramped police cells, most of the time near the
dilapidated and stinking toilet bowl.
Article 9
1. Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person. No one shall be
subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention. No one shall be deprived of his
liberty except on such grounds and in accordance with such procedure as
are established by law.
In violation of this Article and in brazen disregard of the Committee’s
recommendations in paragraph 2, Section 11 of the Concluding Observations on the
Philippines adopted on October 30, 2003, children, upon their arrest, routinely get locked
up in police jails packed with adult crime suspects. This standard operating procedure
among officers of the Philippine National Police violates Article 191 of the Child and
Youth Welfare Code (Presidential Decree 603) and Section 11 of the Rules and
Regulations on the Apprehension, Investigation, Prosecution and Rehabilitation of Youth
Offenders, both of which require law enforcers to turn over children, upon arrest, to the
custody of social workers and/or responsible members of the community.
The Child and Youth Welfare Code or Presidential Decree 603 mandates law
enforcers to immediately divert and turn over children, at the precise moment of arrest,
to the custody of social workers and/or responsible members of the community. 31 This
provision gets reiterated in the 1995 Rules and Regulations on the Apprehension,
Investigation, Prosecution and Rehabilitation of Youth Offenders. Law enforcers,
however, violate this provision by locking up children in police prisons instead.
The arrest, imprisonment, and dehumanization inflicted in characteristic fashion
by law enforcers upon child prisoners on a wide scale and institutionalized manner, with
the conspiratorial acquiescence, tacit consent, and implicit authority of their own
Commander-in-Chief, who is the President of the Philippines, along with her top police
and Cabinet secretaries violate the Philippines’ own Constitution and statutes, especially
their right to due process of law and equal protection of the laws, 32 not to mention its
own treaty obligations.
The Family Courts Act of 1997 or Republic Act 8369 also provides for
diversionary measures in order to prevent the stigmatization of children arising from their
contact with the police. 33 Despite this welter of laws, children do not get diverted at all at
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