Good News from South Sudan
Last week we heard the good news from South Sudan that Magai Matiop Ngong’s death sentence has been quashed by the South Sudan Court of Appeal.
Magai was sentenced to death in 2017, when he was just 15 years old. In recent years South Sudan has executed at least two people who were children at the time of the crime, despite this being contrary to South Sudanese law and international law. Magai’s case was included in the annual Write for Rights campaign in 2019 and many of us took action.
USA: Families in Immigration Detention Action
The judge-imposed deadline for all children to be released from family detention facilities, described by the judge as “on fire” with Covid-19 is now 7thAugust. As outlined in our previous mailing, there are concerns over family separations, if ICE chooses not to release parents along with their children. Family separation in this way would violate rights to liberty and family unity and the requirement to prioritize the best interests of the child.
Take action by sending an urgent email, calling on the US authorities to release all families together.
Yezidi child survivors of ‘Islamic State’
Amnesty International has published a new report on the plight of Yezidi children who were held captive by the armed group calling itself Islamic State (IS). From 2014 to 2017 IS committed war crimes and crimes against the Yezidi community in Iraq, which a UN Commission of Inquiry concluded in 2015 amounted to genocide.
Thousands of children were killed, abducted, enslaved, tortured, forced to fight, raped and subjected to other egregious human rights violations. Hundreds of child survivors now face significant challenges including:
- The serious impact on physical health for many who were starved, tortured or forced fight, including debilitating, long-term injuries, illnesses of conditions and whose health needs not being met.
- Insufficient psychosocial services and programmes to meet the mental health of children affected by terrible trauma. The most common conditions experienced by the children are reported to be PTSD, anxiety and depression.
- Many Yezidi girls experienced sexual violence, but it is reported that existing programmes for survivors of sexual violence have largely neglected girls and focussed on adult women.
- Many children face language barriers, being unable to speak or even understand the dialect of Kurdish spoken by their families.
- Particular challenges accessing education after missing years of schooling during captivity, and struggling to access programmes to help due to a lack of awareness, or extensive levels of bureaucracy to do so.
- Significant barriers obtaining new or replacement documentation that is needed, e.g. ID cards, residence cards, ration cards, birth certificate.
- Yezidi women who gave birth to children as a result of sexual violence have faced difficulties due to many factors – forcing then into the position of either keeping children and giving up their families and community, or giving up their children and reuniting with families and community.
Amnesty is calling on the authorities, with support, to address health and psychosocial needs of children; provide language training and increased access to learning programmes; and remove barriers in obtaining documents.
Furthermore, women with children born of sexual violence must be supported to remain or reunite with their children if they wish to do so and international organisations such as UNHCR should cooperate with other governments to prioritise and fast-track them for resettlement or humanitarian relocation.
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