Human Rights Committee - Philippine Center for Investigative ...

clamoring to stop these Covenant violations to no avail. The materials posted on the
Web as a part of the media and cyber campaigns to stop these violations could still be
accessed through the Internet. 11 Journalist Chris Rogers of BBC even testified before
the U.S. Congress about these violations, to wit:
Statement by Chris Rogers, ITN 12
Members of Congress, ladies and gentlemen:
When I was sixteen years old I presented a series for BBC television aimed
at children my age. The series looked in depth at the lives of teenagers
around the world. In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, I spent many days filming with
some of the city's 10,000 street children, who steal, beg and sniff glue to get
by for another day. Their plight shocked me just as it was intended to shock
a young British audience. From that moment on I decided to dedicate much
of my carrier as a journalist to highlighting the plight of the youngest of the
poor, and so my relationship with the Jubilee Campaign began. I have filmed
children sleeping in the sewers of Bucharest, Romania, and found an eightyear-old
girl working for rice by chipping rock boulders in a stone quarry in
Katmandu, Nepal. She had maggots seeping from her leg; her flesh was
rotting from a wound caused by a rock which had fallen on her. These
images I have reported have never failed to shock the audience I brought
them to, and yet nothing seems to change. Millions of children continue to
suffer.
Five months ago I was on the Internet, researching a story I wanted to do on
the gun culture of Brazil's street children, but the amazing Google took me to
a web site created by a Catholic missionary in the Philippines. There I saw a
photo of five-year-old Rose, one hand clinging to the bar of a prison cell, the
other clinging to a can of Coke. Sitting behind her in the crowded cell were
adult convicts and other children who had been rounded up by the police that
night. On his website Father Shay Cullen explained that his only weapon
against the imprisonment of children was his camera. He hoped this photo
would inspire an end to this breach of children's rights. With the help of
Jubilee, I made contact with Shay in the hope that I could tell Rose's story.
What I didn't realize was that there were 4,000 other children like her, all held
in overcrowded adult jails, accused of petty crimes, some guilty of nothing,
unwanted and homeless. This was a bigger story than I first thought--one
that had not been told, one that would be difficult to tell--but Shay Cullen, it
seemed, had faith in me. We decided the only way I could possibly obtain
the images I needed was to go undercover and pose as a member of Shay's
team--a group that tirelessly tours the country's prisons helping child
prisoners. You will see the results of this undercover investigation in a
moment and they will shock and appall you.
It's just after 2 p.m. in Washington. What happens at 2 p.m. in a Manila jail?
In Novatas Prison there are around forty children standing in a cell with
adults right now, their hands tightly gripping the cell door bars. The metal,
heated by the intense sun, will be scorching their palms and fingers. They
have to cling to something, as they are so weak from hunger and thirst. They
would lie on the hot floor but there isn't any room; they have to stand! Just
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