Wassim (not his real name) has got used to selling napkin boxes at an intersection on a main street in Beirut. This «modest» career of his did not deter the owner of a next door shop from threatening him. «If you stay here, I’ll send you to jail!» But the boy had found in this place the opportunity of selling more, so he did not budge.
One day, a security officer arrived. Wassim understood that the man would carry out his threat. He decided to run, but the «cop» was faster than him. He surprised him with a slap that threw him to the ground. Then he dragged him by the neck to a side street. «I’ll take you to the police station, you thief!» He hurled insults and threats at him. Then he slapped him again and left shouting, «If I ever catch you here again, I’ll throw you in jail!»
In a hypothetical development of events, the security officer could take Wassim to the police station to interrogate him on some charge. Then he could refer his case to the court. He would be sentenced to prison in the Juveniles wing at Roumieh or at the rehabilitation center in Fanar. The judge may instead take a measure that would not deprive him of liberty. In another case, the judge could consider whether the juvenile is at risk and decide whether he needs protection procedures.
Arrested juveniles take different courses in Lebanon as stipulated by Law No. 422, which the legislators were keen to call the law for protection of juveniles, whether offenders or at risk. However, these courses are subject to infringements and violations and some of them require limiting their use, amendments and new procedures.
To the police station...
«The juvenile who breaks the law benefits from fair and humane treatment… and juveniles shall not be detained along with adults.»
The procedures for prosecuting a juvenile offender begin with taking him to the police station in handcuffs. This is contrary to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, according to the former minister Mona Ofeich, president of Father Afif Osseiran Foundation that engages in the rehabilitation of the juveniles in the Roumieh Prison. But infringements are not limited to that, as juveniles are subjected upon arrest to beatings and ill-treatment sometimes, on the street or at the police station, according to Omar Iskandarani, President of Juveniles and Child Rights Committee at the Beirut Bar Association.
While Iskandarani affirms that Law No. 422 is applied to all juveniles in Lebanon, regardless of nationality, one of the activists engaged in monitoring violations against Syrian refugees says that there are abuses taking place outside of the law. Syrian juveniles are treated as the weakest link, starting with how they are treated on the street by some security personnel and all the way to the treatment of other detainees in prison.
The law prohibits conducting investigations with juveniles at the police station without the presence of a social worker to protect juveniles from possible abuse or intimidation. The law provides a maximum deadline of six hours for the worker to arrive. However, while waiting for the social worker, juveniles are sent to the detention cell along with adults detained for various offenses, despite the law prohibiting this practice, according to Iskandarani.
Violations of the law do not end at this. According to Ofeich, sometimes social workers do not arrive within the prescribed deadlines, due to understaffing. In such cases, the person responsible for the investigation might not fulfill the imposed conditions and may proceed with the initial investigation with the detained juvenile alone. However, the lack of workers does not justify that, as Article 47 of the Code of Criminal Procedure states that each detainee has the right to contact a family member and to the presence of a lawyer of his choice.
In the sequence of the prescribed actions, the initial investigation ends by contacting the Prosecutor General. And the lack of prosecutors specializing in juvenile cases mean further delays in procedures. In addition, the law does not impose the presence of the worker at this stage, which is a demand lodged by the relevant organizations.
To the Palace of Justice...
«His prosecution procedures [of the juvenile] and his interrogation and trial are subject to some special rules, that try to spare him as far as possible judicial proceedings…»
The detained juvenile is transferred from the police station, if the Attorney General so decides, to a Palace of Justice, where he is placed under pre-trial detention. The Law has set the period of custody to 48 hours, with possibility of extending it by another 48 hours if required by a decision to expand the investigation. At this stage, the juvenile is also detained along with adults in a cell that is usually crowded with detainees on various charges. However, violations take a far more dangerous turn when the period of detention exceeds those set by the law, according to Ofeich.
The next step leads to the investigating judge. According to the law, any juvenile has the right to appoint a lawyer. If his parents are not able to do that, the judge can appoint an «available» lawyer, without taking into account the specialization requirement. To limit this practice, the two committees in the Beirut Bar Association, Juveniles and Legal Aid, seek to secure specialized lawyers, a list of whose names are sent to judges.
As a result, starting with the police station and its security personnel, to the Prosecutor General and the investigating judge and the lawyers appointed in a rush, juveniles are subject to procedures carried out by non-specialized persons. The investigation phase is concluded with referral of the case to the juvenile court judge. In specific cases, the ordinary judiciary examines the case, especially in the event of a juvenile participating with a non-juvenile in a crime, where similar cases take a lot of time to decide.
The latter case raises several problems, most importantly the issue of confidentiality. Ofeich says, «Adults may request public hearings for their trial, and the court is obliged to grant this demand, and therefore may not fulfill to secrecy requirement when trying the juvenile, and this is a flagrant violation.»
To the prison...
«The juvenile needs special help to rehabilitate him so he can fulfill his role in the society... In any case, the interests of the juvenile must be taken into account to protect him from delinquency...»
In the Juveniles building in the Roumieh prison, detainees are divided between those who have been sentenced to prison and those who are awaiting a decision. The delays in deciding on the cases of detainees apply to juvenile cases as well, according to Iskandarani. But the effects of this delay are compounded for juveniles, in light of the spirit of the law aiming to protect them.
With the rising number of detainees, especially in the year 2016, sometimes up to 15 juveniles are detained in one cell in poor humanitarian conditions. Although the statistics have not been completed yet, Ofeich attributes this increase to the rise in the number of Syrian detainees.
Talk of the high number of Syrians detainees in recent years has neglected the diversity of the charges and the cases relating to them. According to a table of offenses, there were 2,882 cases in 2014, according to the latest available statistics on the Ministry of Justice’s website. Out of these cases, there are charges relating to, for example, identification documents (550 cases, the biggest category), mendicity (51), illegal residence (152), public order (83), shoe shining (46), street selling (128), five cases of scarp collection and eight cases on charges of going through the trash!
Moreover, in the juvenile prison, established procedures do not separate those accused of using drugs from those accused of trafficking, for example, or those arrested on charges of theft from those on charges of murder or attempted murder, which runs contrary to the principle of taking into account the interests of each and every juvenile so as to protect him from delinquency.
The detainees are subject, under the law on the protection of juveniles, to a rehabilitation process under the supervision of specialized teams. But this care provided by the law is limited in time and ends daily by the afternoon!
Ofeich says that the organizations working with rehabilitating juveniles are subject to the rules of the Roumieh prison, and therefore are under obligation to vacate the building at precisely two in the afternoon. In the absence of such teams, the responsibility of following up on the situation of the prisoners falls with the security forces. Although Ofeich denies that juveniles come in contact with adults inside the prison, Iskandarani affirms that the Juveniles building is used as a general prison due to overcrowding in the Roumieh buildings, which according to him constitutes «a clear and flagrant violation».
Such discrepancies only contribute to more ambiguity instead of setting the record straight!
In the mornings, when the rehabilitation teams are present, a team of «rehabilitated prisoners» is also present, charged by the prison administration to supervise the juveniles. After two in the afternoon, these prisoners remain alone with the juveniles in a room located in the same building, without supervision of the organizations who work in the prison, which entails the likelihood violations and contact between juveniles and adults, in violation of the law, and most recently rape!
While Ofeich avoids expressly confirming any rape cases, she does pose questions in the same vein: who guarantees that the adult room remains locked in the evenings? Who oversees the actions of those prisoners? And is it permissible that an adult prisoner supervise a juvenile prisoner in the first place?
On the other hand, Iskandarani confirms the rape incidents and violence used by adult prisoners, supporting his statement with confirmations of that from one of the judges specializing in juvenile cases.
