ABOVE: Children detained by immigration officials in Songkhla province on March 15. Photo: Tuwaedaniya Meringing / AFP
Hundreds of children in Thailand live behind bars for years at a time crammed into unsanitary cells at immigration detention centers throughout the country, according to a report released by Human Rights Watch yesterday.
“Some of the children, once released, cannot not run properly. They complained of cramps in their legs and being winded from not being able to grow properly in a cell,” said Alice Farmer, a Human Rights Watch researcher in the Child Rights Division.
The report says that since the junta seized power in May this year, undocumented migrants, refugees and asylum seekers and their children have been arrested in greater numbers, leading to further overcrowding of rooms and worsening conditions for detained children – who range from newborns to adolescents and are often unable to lie down to sleep in cramped rooms, notes the report.
“Now we see 160 to 180 persons in a cell whereas before it was half that number,” said Christopher Eades, the Thailand Legal Services Director for Jesuit Refugee Service, an NGO that was expeled from Bangkok’s Suanphlu Immigration Detention Center (IDC) in June, 2014, where refugee families are held. Since then the service has unable to bail out refugee families by paying the THB50,000 fee most are unable to afford.
“Everybody we have tried to bail since being asked to leave IDC has been rejected, including three children under the age of 10 and one teenage boy,” Eades explained.
Immense trauma and psychological harm is being done to children as young as 3, who grow up in prison-like conditions with adults, witness violence and eat inadequately nutritious food, according to Human Rights Watch.
Meanwhile the Thai government says it is up to migrant parents to protect their children from detention.
“Detention of children in Thailand is not a result of the government’s policies but rather the preference of their migrant parents themselves [for] family unity,” noted the government’s response to the report.
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