eng - World Organisation Against Torture

or their parents/guardian could never be expectedto pay. In one of the cases, the bailfor a ten-year old child accused of theft wasset at the equivalent of USD 2,000. Thisamount would be impossible for the averagemiddle-income earner to pay in thePhilippines, let alone an impoverished child.Under international human rights law andexcept in the most serious of cases, it isillegal for persons awaiting trial to be deniedthe right to bail while detained in custody.Prosecutors conducting preliminary/inquestinvestigations have been given guidelinesfrom the Office of the Public Prosecutorsetting out the appropriate bail amounts withregards to the seriousness of the offencescharged. However, there are no separateguidelines for minors who are guaranteedspecial protection under the law.Conditions While in DetentionDespite international texts which have establishedthe minimum standards for thetreatment of children in detention and recentrulings by the Supreme Court of thePhilippines, such as the Rule on Juveniles inConflict with the Law, any positive treatmentof children in Philippine jails is rare and oftenprovided by NGOs rather than the State.Since the previous alternative country reporton the Philippines for the Human RightsCommittee the conditions of abuse of childrenin detention have not changed. In fact, conditionshave grown worse as poverty increasesand more and more children are marginalizedin society and families are breaking up in thedesperate search for food.In the Philippines, children as young as nineyears old could be tried as adults, and subsequentlysent to adult jails. AlthoughPhilippine law stipulates that children withpending cases should be brought to theYDCs, in most cases, this has not been possiblesince only a dozen of these centres existin the entire country, and they are usuallyfull. According to conservative estimates, thenumber of children in jails has grown to morethan 20,000, or 10 percent of the total prisonpopulation.While in detention, the children are treatedalmost identically as adult inmates. In someof the jails visited by PREDA, the childrenwere detained in separate cells from theadult prisoners. In the others, they werecrammed into small cells along with convictedadult prisoners. In all of the jails,PREDA documented that the children mixed43