I. SummarySaudi Arabia’s criminal justice system lacks any codified penal law and grants prosecutors and judges broad discretion in charging and sentencing individuals for ill-defined offenses. This promotes arbitrary outcomes that contravene international standards of due process, and whose impact is magnified because Saudi Arabia retains the death penalty and other forms of physical punishment as criminal sanctions, including flogging and amputation. For children who come into conflict with the law, Saudi Arabia has juvenile courts and detention facilities, but no comprehensive legislation or framework to address how these children should be treated. This means they suffer under a system that ultimately fails to uphold the rights of all children to protection from abuse and ill-treatment and to due process, and discriminates against girls and foreign children. Children are especially at a disadvantage in a criminal justice system that takes little account of their special needs. Abuses of Children in Conflict with the LawVery few Saudi laws or regulations explicitly address the rights of child offenders, or how their cases are to be handled, leaving law enforcement officials, judges, and prosecutors with broad discretion in determining when to arrest children, how long to detain them, and what punishments to impose on those deemed to have broken the law. Judicial discretion is exacerbated by the lack of law setting an age below which a child should not be tried as an adult. As a result, judges often treat as adults persons who were under age 18 at the time of an alleged crime. Judges can sentence to death, amputation, or flogging children still under 18 as well as those now over 18 but who committed the crime while under age 18. Often such sentences will be imposed following trials where they had no legal counsel and little capacity or opportunity to defend themselves. In addition, authorities often treat foreign children who are victims of trafficking primarily as offenders and they can be arrested, detained, or deported for begging or lack of legal residency. Many children deported in these circumstances are at risk of return to places where they face irreparable harm. The government has been reluctant to acknowledge and address these enormous gaps in child protection, leaving children vulnerable in a system that lacks adequate, independent child protection mechanisms. Human Rights Watch is aware of at least 12 cases of persons sentenced to death for offenses committed while under age 18, including three cases of juvenile offenders who were executed in 2007. The true number of such sentences is likely to be much higher: while Saudi Arabian authorities do not publish statistics on death sentences against juvenile offenders, the most recent publicly available Ministry of Social Affairs statistics (for 2003) show 126 “persons under 18” detained for homicide, a capital offense. This figure does not appear to include Saudi Arabian or foreign girls charged with homicide, and it does not include persons over age 18 who have been sentenced to death for crimes committed while under age 18. No laws or regulations require judges to evaluate the child’s mental, emotional, and intellectual maturity when determining to try a child as an adult. Human Rights Watch has documented cases of children as young as 13 at the time of the offense whom courts have sentenced to death as a consequence of the judges’ determination, based on the child’s physical development alone, that the child is mature. Children under age 12 may also be subject to arrest and prosecution because new standards announced in 2006 raising the age of criminal responsibility from seven to 12 for boys do not appear to be well publicized or enforced. Regulations governing girls in conflict with the law do not set any minimum age of criminal responsibility. Police and agents from the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPVPV) routinely stop in the street and sometimes detain children for minor offenses such as exchanging phone numbers with members of the opposite sex. Girls are at special risk of arbitrary detention and prosecution for vague offenses such as “mingling” or “seclusion,” which can include being found alone with a male who is not a family member. Since 2006 CPVPV officers are required to be accompanied by a police officer when making arrests, and as of July 2007 are not supposed to detain people at their facilities at all, but should hand them over to police. It is far from clear whether in practice this is what happens. In any event, prosecutors can order children detained to be held for investigation for up to six months without judicial review. During this time, children rarely have access to lawyers or other appropriate assistance. Outside of the criminal justice system, the Ministry of Social Affairs can detain both boys and girls indefinitely even though the child has been neither charged with nor convicted of an offence. Ministry of Social Affairs staff need only decide that the child needs additional “guidance” or that their guardians have failed to claim them. Such detention is subject to judicial review for boys, but not for girls. Saudi Arabian law allows officials in Ministry of Interior prisons and Ministry of Social Affairs detention centers to use corporal punishment against children, and punishments such as solitary confinement and denial of family visits. Judges also regularly order corporal punishment as a judicial penalty. Girls are also subject to mandatory medical testing, and if such tests reveal they have a sexually transmitted disease, Ministry of Social Affairs officials have the authority to place girls and young women under age 30 in isolation that is both medically-unwarranted and stigmatizing. Authorities fail to adequately categorize and separate detained children, routinely mixing convicted children with children under investigation, and in some cases mixing children with adults. In one boys’ detention facility Human Rights Watch visited, only one supervisor was responsible for monitoring a dormitory for 17- and 18-year-old detainees with 90 beds—a situation that increases children’s risk of abuse by other detainees. At a girls’ detention facility, we found smaller dormitories, but still too few dormitories to adequately separate children by age and from adults, to separate convicted detainees from those held pending trial, and to separate detainees accused of serious offenses from those accused of minor offenses. Children, whether being questioned in detention or facing trial, have little access to legal or other assistance, even when facing serious charges. While Saudi Arabian law allows criminal suspects the right to seek the assistance of a lawyer or representative, it does not require investigators to halt questioning of children until a guardian or lawyer arrives, and it does not provide for a lawyer free of charge for those who cannot afford one. By law, Ministry of Social Affairs staff must attend interrogations held in its detention centers for children, but when Human Rights Watch observed one child being questioned and other children waiting to be questioned at the Riyadh Social Observation Home, the staff sat in a separate room, too far away to hear or provide meaningful assistance, and none of the children’s guardians were present. In 2006 the government proposed updating existing regulations to significantly increase the number of law enforcement agencies authorized to question children at their premises rather than in juvenile detention centers and to allow these agencies to take unspecified steps to “resolve” cases. Children questioned at police stations and other law enforcement agencies have even fewer protections against coercion than those questioned at juvenile detention centers and if a “resolution” is reached, it is not subject to judicial review. Criminalizing Foreign Children in Need of ProtectionSaudi Arabian officials have estimated that 24,000 children trafficked from 18 countries are involved in street selling and begging in Saudi Arabia. Instead of treating these children as victims and providing them with access to services such as voluntary shelters and adequate health care, the authorities arrest them for begging and illegal residency and deport them to their countries of origin. Many children are from countries where they are at risk of re-trafficking or underage recruitment into armed conflict, and as such they should not be repatriated without a thorough evaluation to determine whether repatriation is in their best interests and that appropriate measures for their protection are in place. According to staff at the Ministry of Social Affairs Residential Center for Child Beggars in Jeddah, staff there routinely assess children’s needs within five days of their arrival, and the vast majority are then deported, even in cases where there is direct evidence that they are at risk of being re-trafficked. Authorities may detain older children with unrelated adults in adult deportation centers with deplorable conditions, putting them at risk of violence including sexual abuse. A March 2007 Council of Ministers decree expanding the Ministry of Social Affairs’ authority to arrest beggars threatens to increase arrests and deportations of children trafficked for begging, straining the capacity of existing centers for child beggars and increasing the likelihood that authorities may detain children in unsafe conditions and repatriate them to countries where they risk abuse. * * * Saudi Arabian authorities need to issue, publicize, and enforce clear rules for protecting children’s rights at all stages of arrest, investigation, trial, and detention. At the top of this list should be laws outlawing the death penalty and all forms of corporal punishment for persons under 18 at the time of the alleged offense. The authorities should also give priority to ending discriminatory laws and practices that make girls vulnerable to arbitrary arrest and detention, and that put foreign children at risk of arrest, detention, and repatriation to situations where they are at risk of abuse. |