Please join #nowaytotreatachild campaign co-leaders from Defense for Children International - Palestine and American Friends Service Committee for a webinar on December 8 at 8 pm Eastern Standard Time / 5 pm Pacific Standard Time.
We will connect our #nowaytotreatachild efforts with work in the United States to release people from prisons, jails, and detention centers—and move toward a future without incarceration.
Everyone deserves dignity and justice. But in the United States, 2.3 million people are locked away in prisons, jails, and detention centers, where they are subject to civil and human rights violations and a lack of access to adequate health care.
Immigration activists, prison abolitionists, and those calling to defund the police are organizing across the country under the call to #FreeThemAll.
AFSC, partners, and communities across the U.S. are coming together between December 10 and December 18 for AFSC's National Days of Action to #FreeThemAll. During the days of action, AFSC will hold protests at prisons, jails, detention centers, ICE offices, state houses, and city halls to demand the immediate release of people from incarceration.
For this webinar, we'll be joined by the special guests below to learn more about the underlying issues and urgent need for action.
Lewis Webb, Jr., Healing Justice Director - New York, American Friends Service Committee
Kristin Kumpf, Director of Human Migration and Mobility, American Friends Service Committee
Peniel Ibe, Policy Associate, American Friends Service Committee
Background
Approximately 2.9 million Palestinians live in the occupied West Bank, of which around 45 percent are children under the age of 18.
Palestinian children in the West Bank, like adults, face arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment under an Israeli military detention system that denies them basic rights.
Since 1967, Israel has operated two separate legal systems in the same territory. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli settlers are subject to the civilian and criminal legal system whereas Palestinians live under military law.
Israel applies civilian criminal law to Palestinian children in East Jerusalem. No Israeli child comes into contact with the military courts.
Israel has the dubious distinction of being the only country in the world that automatically and systematically prosecutes children in military courts that lack fundamental fair trial rights and protections. Israel prosecutes between 500 and 700 Palestinian children in military courts each year.
Ill-treatment in the Israeli military detention system remains “widespread, systematic, and institutionalized throughout the process,” according to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report Children in Israeli Military Detention Observations and Recommendations.
Children typically arrive to interrogation bound, blindfolded, frightened, and sleep deprived.
Children often give confessions after verbal abuse, threats, physical and psychological violence that in some cases amounts to torture.
Israeli military law provides no right to legal counsel during interrogation, and Israeli military court judges seldom exclude confessions obtained by coercion or torture.
ABOUT #NOWAYTOTREATACHILD'S WEBINARS AND ZOOM:
For this webinar, we will be using the Zoom platform. Additional instructions and details for joining the webinar will be shared by email with individuals that have registered.