SANAA, 18 March (IRIN) - Members of Yemen's Child Parliament are concerned about illegal practices against juveniles in prisons following field visits to a number of detention centres in Sana'a, the capital.

They called on the government on 14 March to free all children from prison or other detention institutions.

"We are very concerned about juveniles who have been held in jails and police stations as they are mistreated," Abdul-Maeen al-Masari, 16, told IRIN. al-Masari is a member of Yemen's Child Parliament, a UNICEF initiative to give children a platform on which to promote children's rights, particularly in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Yemen ratified this convention in 1991. However, according to Yemeni law, any child between the ages of seven and 15 is treated as a juvenile, while internationally a juvenile is up to 18 years old.

At their recent session, Child Parliament members called on the government to make 18 the legal age limit for juveniles. The government is yet to approve this proposal.

"We visited children in detention aged between 12 and 16 and found them in miserable conditions. They had been beaten, malnourished, sexually exploited, held without trial and held for minor crimes," al-Masari said.

Most of these children had committed minor crimes, such as theft and fighting, and some were accused of homosexuality and violence, he said.

Children raped by guards

Al-Masari said children told the young MPs that they had been given badly cooked beans and bread for breakfast since their imprisonment, and that guards had raped some of them.

"One of the children has been held for three months for stealing a small pot; another for five months for stealing 10,000 riyals [US $ 50] and has not been tried," al-Masari said.

In the capital's Central Prison, 31 juveniles were put in one damp room with bad sanitary conditions and poor ventilation, he added.

It is against Yemeni law to put a juvenile in prison for more than 24 hours.

"When a juvenile commits a crime, his detention shouldn't exceed 24 hours, and it should be only the juvenile prosecution that decides his detention," Colonel Ali Awad Farwa, general manager of the General Administration of Women and Juvenile Affairs at the Yemeni Ministry of Interior, told IRIN.

According to Farwa, there are about 76 children in four provisional detention centres as well as in the Central Prison. "Most of them were not sent to the juvenile prosecution, but rather tried at the public prosecution," he added.

Children who break the law should be sent to juvenile centres rather than prisons or police stations, said Jamal al-Shami, the Chairman of Democracy School, a local NGO that works as the General Secretariat for the Child Parliament.

"But in some cases this doesn't happen, as prisons are full of juveniles. They live in hard conditions and undergo sexual harassment, beatings and torture," he said, holding the Ministry of Interior and Prosecution responsible for delaying the trial of imprisoned children.

Members of Yemen's Child Parliament visited children in different prisons, hospitals and workplaces from 27 January until 6 February. Based on the visits, they produced a report entitled 'Prisons without Children' which they discussed at their fourth session on 12 to 14 March. At the session, they also questioned officials from the ministries of interior, social affairs and labour, justice, and human rights.

Al-Shami said the young parliamentarians will revisit the prisons later in the year to see if the concerned authorities have responded to their recommendations. "These [young] MPs have played a big role in defending the rights of children, and we hope the government will take their recommendations into consideration," he added.

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