A United Nations expert has expressed concern that tens of thousands of children remain in arbitrary detention in northeastern Syria based on their parents’ alleged ties to ISIL (ISIS) in violation of international law.
“The thing I will say that concerned me the most and my team the most as we visited northeast Syria was the mass indefinite and arbitrary detention of children, particularly boys, in various types of facilities,” Fionnuala Ni Aolain said on Friday, a day after returning from what she said was the first visit to the region by a UN human rights expert.
Ni Aolain, an independent UN rapporteur on the protection of rights while countering terrorism, said the children’s detentions were “premised on the alleged threat that they pose to security based on their or their parents’ alleged prior links with Daesh”, she said, using the Arabic acronym for ISIL.
“There appears to be no understanding that it is in absolute contravention of international law to detain children in what appears to be an unending cycle of cradle-to-grave detention,” she added.
Ni Aolain also raised concerns about the separation of hundreds of adolescent boys from their mothers in camps based on the alleged security risk they pose. She did not say where the boys have gone but has previously said they went to unknown locations.
“Every single woman I spoke to made clear that it was the snatching of children that provided the most anxiety, the most suffering, the most psychological harm,” she said. “The rationale for taking these boys simply does not stand up to scrutiny.”
Original from www.aljazeera.com