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| Cambodian schoolchildren walk on a muddy road near the dam site of Steung Mean Chey after they participated in an Intentional Children's Day event in the outskirts of Phnom Penh. (Photo: AP) |
Chun Sakada, VOA Khmer
Phnom Penh Wednesday, 01 June 2011
“The system is totally incapable of providing for a child’s basic needs—education, proper nutrition, medical care, and so on."
The local rights group Licadho met with juvenile prisoners and mothers in prison on Wednesday, offering food and other comforts to inmates as the country marked International Children’s Day.
Cambodian prisons are overcrowded and under-funded, the group said, and “children often bear the brunt of the system’s dysfunction.”
“In most provincial prisons, for example, minor prisoners are fully integrated with the adult population,” it said in a statement. “Food rations are inadequate and medical care is often non-existent.”
“Prisons, in general, are no place for children and juveniles,” Licadho founder Pung Chhiv Kek said. “The system is totally incapable of providing for a child’s basic needs—education, proper nutrition, medical care, and so on. The experience is more likely to harden juveniles than rehabilitate them.”
Licadho distributed 1,200 packets containing bread, soy sauce, fruit and other items like toothpaste, soap, toys and combs in prisons across the country.
Phean Chhor Vorn, prison chief of Banteay Meanchey province, said two NGOs had visited and made distributions for 45 juvenile inmates, who are facing between two- and five-year sentences.
The government estimates some 730 juvenile prisoners—those aged between 14 and 17—are incarcerated in the country’s 25 prisons.
4 comments:
Child Rights are fundamental freedoms and the inherent rights of all human beings below the age of 18 and these rights apply to every child. The Convention on the Rights of the Child defines basic rights of children covering multiple needs and issues. Children's rights are the human rights of children with particular attention to the rights of special protection and care afforded to the young. Children's rights are defined in numerous ways, including a wide spectrum of civil, cultural, economic, social and political rights. UNICEF mission is to advocate for the protection of children’s rights, to help meet their basic needs and to expand their opportunities to reach their full potential.
Documentary - "Malaysia's Invisible Children" reveals the condition of the children who are stateless, refugees, or street kids. These kids face sexual abuse, imprisonment, deportation, and human trafficking and are continually failed by a lack of education, social support, and a justice system that often even perpetuates these cycles of abuse.
To watch please visit - http://www.cultureunplugged.com/play/4783
I watched it and most of time I saw adults talking about education, care and prevent.
I saw a few kids in a classroom look alike and did not see any children on the street which claimed to be 500,000 children.
It's ridiculously exaggeration.
correction:
prevention
children are the future, please teach them right, guide them right, treat them right, etc, etc. encourage them to stay in school to finish their education, etc for cambodia good future depend on them and how well they are getting education both about cambodia and the world as well, ok! god bless the little children of cambodia.
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