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IX. Conditions for Foreign Children in Need of Protection

Saudi Arabia routinely arrests and deports hundreds of thousands of foreigners found begging or otherwise violating the terms of their visas.²¹¹ Among these are children trafficked for begging, children engaged in forced labor, and children who are dependents of adults facing deportation. According to UNICEF, in 2006 Saudi Arabian officials estimated that 24,000 children trafficked from 18 countries are involved in street selling and begging in Saudi Arabia;²¹² a 2004 study on child trafficking in Yemen estimated that Saudi Arabia deported 10,000 children to Yemen in the first quarter of that year.²¹³ More recently, the Ministry of Social Affairs recorded 7,450 arrests of children for begging in the Hijri year 1427 (roughly coinciding with 2006), and 5,179 in 1428 (roughly coinciding with 2007).²¹⁴

Several factors contribute to the large number of foreign children trafficked for begging and other exploitation. Saudi Arabia is home to important religious sites that make it a destination for millions of foreign Muslims during the annual hajj and `umrah seasons.<sup>215</sup> Traffickers take advantage of easier visa requirements and a heightened ethos of charitable giving during hajj and `umrah seasons to bring foreign children to Saudi Arabia during these periods, when UNICEF estimates a child beggar can earn the equivalent of US$250 or more per day.²¹⁶ Some migrant workers also use hajj or `umrah visas to bring to Saudi Arabia wives and children who would not otherwise qualify for visas.²¹⁷ These dependents lose their legal status when their visas expire, and children born to a parent lacking legal residency are not eligible for birth registration.²¹⁸ Children who lack legal residency cannot be registered in public or private schools or access public health services, encouraging some families to employ them as beggars or “rent” them to others to use in begging.²¹⁹ As a consequence, these children in their turn are at risk of recruitment by organized trafficking networks for use in begging, commercial sexual exploitation, or other labor exploitation.

Saudi Arabia has not issued comprehensive criminal anti-trafficking legislation, nor created formal screening mechanisms to identify victims of forced labor and trafficking and refer them to appropriate protective services.²²⁰ The Labor Law does ban employment of persons under age 15 in hazardous labor, and calls on employers to “refrain from using the worker without pay,” but it imposes only relatively light penalties on employers who violate these provisions.²²¹ Prosecutions of traffickers or other individuals exploiting foreign children remain rare.²²² Despite the government’s recent creation of a few centers for foreign children who are victims of trafficking and exploitation, it still detains these children in closed facilities that offer few support services, and in many cases repatriates these children to situations where they are at risk of abuse. Equally disturbing, a March 2007 Council of Ministers decree orders authorities to take legal action against non-Saudi beggars and authorizes undefined “status determinations” of child beggars within 24 hours of arrest (see below). Such actions appear to be speeding up deportations, thereby increasing the risk that the government will repatriate children without ensuring that repatriation is in the individual child’s best interests.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child guarantees all children in Saudi Arabia the rights under the convention without discrimination on the basis of national origin or status.²²³ Among these are the right to birth registration and education, and the right to protection from sexual exploitation, economic exploitation, and trafficking.²²⁴ States must take “all appropriate measures” to promote the physical and psychological recovery and social reintegration of a child victim of neglect, exploitation, abuse, torture, or any other form of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, or armed conflicts, and must provide special protection and assistance to any child “temporarily or permanently deprived of his or her family environment, or in whose own best interests cannot be allowed to remain in that environment.” ²²⁵

The most widely accepted definition of child trafficking is that of the Trafficking Protocol of the Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, which defines child trafficking as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, or receipt of a child for the purposes of sexual or labor exploitation, forced labor, or slavery.²²⁶ Saudi Arabia is a state party to the Trafficking Protocol and has acceded also to the Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labour, which requires states to take urgent action to prohibit and eliminate child trafficking and forced labor, including forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict.²²⁷

The Role of Ministry of Social Affairs Offices for Combating Begging

The Ministry of Social Affairs operates eight Offices for Combating Begging (makatib mukafahat al-tasawwul) that work in coordination with law enforcement and other government agencies to combat begging.²²⁸ In most instances the ministry refers Saudi Arabian nationals found begging to social services, while non-nationals who lack legal residence are referred to immigration authorities for deportation, a process that usually takes a few days to a few weeks.²²⁹ Migrant children with legal residency who are arrested alone for begging pay a fine and are released to their families after the first two arrests but are deported if arrested a third time; children without residency are detained pending deportation (see below).²³⁰

A March 2007 Council of Ministers decree authorizes “field committees” made up of Offices for Combating Begging, the police, the General Directorate of Passports, and the Commission to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice to conduct arrests of beggars at the request of the Ministry of Social Affairs, and at least one such committee was functioning by May 2007.²³¹ The decree also orders the Ministry of Social Affairs to conduct undefined “status determinations” of child beggars within 24 hours of arrest and to “transfer all non-Saudi beggars to the General Directorate of Passports for legal proceedings against them.” ²³²  In March 2008 Ministry of Social Affairs officials told Human Rights Watch that the government was still finalizing its new strategy for combating begging, and that a coordinating committee working on finalizing a repatriation agreement between Saudi Arabia and Yemen had not met since the previous Ramadan (roughly September 2007).²³³ 

Inadequate Procedures for Determining Children’s Best Interests during Deportation Proceedings

In 2003 Saudi Arabia began working with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to create residential centers for children pending deportation to their countries of origin.²³⁴ Three such centers now exist: one in Jeddah, one in Mekkah, and one in Riyadh.²³⁵ According to UNICEF, “The role of the center is understood as ‘tasallum wa tasliim’ – that is, receiving the children from immigration [authorities] and, after providing interim care, delivering them to immigration officials for deportation to their countries of origin.”²³⁶ The director of the Ministry of Social Affairs’ Administration for Combating Begging reiterated this view, saying “We don’t have any responsibility to trace children’s families. That is the responsibility of the country of origin. Our responsibility is to return children.”²³⁷ While the centers appear to offer a higher standard of care than that previously offered to child migrants, Human Rights Watch is concerned that these programs discriminate against older children and married or widowed girls by excluding them from services, and that procedures currently in place are inadequate to evaluate individual children’s needs or ensure that repatriation is in the child’s best interests.

Human Rights Watch visited one of these centers, the Ministry of Social Affairs’ Jeddah Residential Center for Child Beggars, in December 2006. The Birr Association, an NGO, administers the facility. According to the association’s supervisor for boys’ residences, the center receives 1,500 to 2,000 foreign children each year and at peak periods houses as many as 150 children. Authorities detain the children until they are deported or returned to relatives, a process that normally takes “10 to 15 days.” During this period children receive a medical examination, a change of clothes, and some basic health care.²³⁸ Approximately 30 percent of the children are girls.²³⁹

Most of the children at the Jeddah Residential Center have been arrested for begging by the General Directorate of Passports or other law enforcement officers. However, among the children present on the day of our visit was an Indonesian infant who appeared to be less than one year old and whose father was detained in the adult deportation center, and a young Yemeni girl whose mother was detained in the women’s prison on criminal charges.²⁴⁰ Most of the 31 children at the Jeddah center on the day of our visit appeared to be under age 12, and several appeared to be under six. According to staff at the center, many of the children are victims of trafficking by criminal gangs or their own families, sometimes multiple times.²⁴¹

Staff at the Jeddah Residential Center told Human Rights Watch that recently the center had put in place new procedures with assistance from UNICEF to individually evaluate each child’s situation and facilitate repatriation.²⁴²

The Committee on the Rights of the Child considers that any assessment process must include a “best interests” determination “in preparation of any decision fundamentally impacting on the unaccompanied or separated child’s life.” Such a determination requires “a clear and comprehensive assessment of the child’s identity, including her or his nationality, upbringing, ethnic, cultural and linguistic background, particular vulnerabilities and protection needs,” and should be carried out “in a friendly and safe atmosphere by qualified professionals who are trained in age and gender-sensitive interviewing techniques.” In addition, states should only refer children to asylum or other procedures after first appointing a competent guardian, and should provide children with a legal representative in addition to a guardian if they refer children to asylum procedures or other administrative or judicial proceedings. ²⁴³

According to a social worker at the Jeddah Center for Child Beggars, Saudi Arabian authorities process and deport most children quite quickly, usually within five days. Although the social worker told Human Rights Watch that she is able to gain the child’s trust sufficiently to evaluate his or her individual situation, determine the country and city of origin, identify the child’s guardian or contact consular officials from the country of origin if she is unable to determine the guardian, and arrange for repatriation to the guardian in the country of origin,²⁴⁴ five days seems a relatively short period in which to be able to effectively accomplish these tasks.²⁴⁵ Social workers must handle multiple cases simultaneously, and their caseloads rise dramatically during the hajj and `umrah seasons, when arrests of beggars peak. It is often difficult to obtain detailed information from young children, who tend to have short attention spans and may lack basic information regarding their parents’ names, addresses, phone numbers, or even nationalities. Children who are victims of trafficking or other forms of exploitation and abuse may not wish to reveal this information if doing so would put them or their loved ones in danger. Decisions to return a child to his or her country of origin are further complicated when the child’s family is implicated in his or her trafficking. These difficulties can be compounded when the country of origin has weak social services and poor communications infrastructure. Such conditions would appear to apply in many of the children’s countries of origin, which according to center staff typically include Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Chad, Somalia, Sudan, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Yemen.²⁴⁶

Ministry of Social Affairs officials cited even shorter average periods between arrest and deportation, saying that most deportations took place “within three to four days.”²⁴⁷

According to UNICEF, the Birr Association allows foreign consular staff “continual unhindered access to the children in the Center.”²⁴⁸ Foreign nationals should have timely access to their consular officials if they wish, and some consulates provide their nationals with important services such as legal representation, translation, and shelter.²⁴⁹ However, embassies and consulates should not be children’s primary avenue for making complaints about abuses, nor their only source for translation services. Consular officials may have multiple reasons for prioritizing maintaining good relations with the host country over ensuring that repatriation decisions reflect an individual child’s best interests, particularly in a country like Saudi Arabia that is a major source of remittances for many countries of origin. ²⁵⁰ In addition, unsupervised contact with consular officials may harm children who have asylum claims by allowing those officials to collect information that could endanger the children or their families in the country of origin. Ministry of Social Affairs officials should supervise or limit consular officials’ access to asylum-seeking children and to those who do not wish to speak to consular officials from their own countries for any other reason.  

Return to Real Risk of Irreparable Harm

The Committee on the Rights of the Child has repeatedly emphasized that “States shall not return a child to a country where there are substantial grounds for believing that there is a real risk of irreparable harm to the child … either in the country to which removal is to be effected or in any country to which the child may subsequently be removed.”²⁵¹ Some of the factors the Committee identifies as presenting a real risk of irreparable harm are underage recruitment and participation in hostilities, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment, and violations of the right to life, survival, and development.²⁵² In particular, it concludes that “States shall refrain from returning a child in any manner whatsoever to the borders of a State where there is a real risk of underage recruitment, including recruitment not only as a combatant but also to provide sexual services for the military or where there is a real risk of direct or indirect participation in hostilities, either as a combatant or through carrying out other military duties.”²⁵³

According to staff at the Jeddah Residential Center for Child Beggars, Saudi Arabian authorities deport children to countries where they are at risk of recruitment as child soldiers and trafficking. Staff told Human Rights Watch that authorities had repatriated a number of children who were nationals of Afghanistan, Chad, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. In Afghanistan, Chad, Somalia, and Sudan, government armies, paramilitaries, or opposition groups recruit and use child soldiers, exposing children returned to those countries to a real risk of underage recruitment.²⁵⁴ In addition, girls may be at special risk of harm when repatriated to Afghanistan, where insecurity and targeted attacks on schools disproportionately affect girls’ right to education;²⁵⁵ Somalia, where high levels of violence and insecurity and a lack of access to basic services has led UNHCR to call on states to refrain from forced returns to southern and central Somalia and to limit returns to northern Somalia;²⁵⁶ Sudan, where UNCHR reports that rapes and assaults occur daily against women and girls collecting firewood and grass in Darfur;²⁵⁷ and Nigeria and Yemen, where girls are at special risk of trafficking internally and abroad for sexual exploitation.²⁵⁸

Saudi Arabian authorities also deported trafficked children even when they had clear evidence that the children were at risk of being re-trafficked. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has stated,

Children who are at risk of being re-trafficked should not be returned to their country of origin unless it is in their best interests and appropriate measures for their protection have been taken. States should consider complementary forms of protection for trafficked children when return is not in their best interests.²⁵⁹ 

A social worker at the Jeddah Residential Center described two cases involving young children repeatedly deported and retrafficked. The first involved a group of Yemeni brothers “who have come back and been deported five times [in less than a year].”

In the second case, she told us,

We had a nine-year-old Yemeni girl of divorced parents. The mother beats her, brings her [to Saudi Arabia] to beg, she doesn’t want her. I told the girl to ask them to put her in the shelter in Yemen but her family knows when she is deported—her 17-year-old brother watches her from Saudi Arabia and they wait for her at the airport. Once her grandmother even went to take her out of the residential center [in Yemen]! I’ve seen her four times at our center: once with her little brother, once with her little sister. She doesn’t try to flee the police because she prefers to be here.²⁶⁰

A Ministry of Social Affairs official acknowledged that retrafficking of Yemeni children was common, citing cases of “children who are deported and return [to Saudi Arabia] within three days,” but attributed the problem to Yemen’s low levels of birth registration, and cultural attitudes.²⁶¹

Detention in Adult Deportation Facilities

Saudi Arabian authorities also detain children in adult deportation facilities, where conditions are reported to be extremely poor.²⁶² Detention with unrelated adults also puts children at increased risk of violence and exploitation from adult detainees. The Convention on the Rights of the Child requires that “every child deprived of liberty shall be separated from adults unless it is considered in the child’s best interest not to do so.”²⁶³

Saudi Arabian officials have not responded to Human Rights Watch’s request for clarification of its policies governing when they detain foreign children in adult deportation facilities. Ministry of Social Affairs officials in March 2008 instead variously described a process where all children arrested for begging would be placed in special sections in social observation homes, or all placed in one of three nongovernmental centers for child beggars under age 12, or placed in one of the nongovernmental centers if under age 12 and in a social observation home if 12 or over.²⁶⁴ The apparent lack of facilities for girls over age 12 was explained by saying that “very few girls are detained for begging because they all have a guardian in Saudi Arabia and so are released the first two times they are arrested if they have legal residence or are deported immediately if they don’t.”²⁶⁵ Human Rights Watch’s research on conditions in social observation homes, discussed above, suggests that it is highly unlikely that these facilities have the space to accommodate large numbers of boys arrested for begging and to separate them from criminal suspects and convicted children.

None of the 31 children detained at the Jeddah Center for Child Beggars at the time of Human Rights Watch’s December 2006 visit appeared to be older than 12. Birr Association staff have given differing accounts of the ages and categories of foreign children accepted there. For example, Salih al-Turki, the chairman of the Birr Association’s administrative council, told al-Watan newpaper in March 2007 that the Jeddah Residential Center “accepts children under 16.”²⁶⁶ The Birr Association supervisor for the facility told Human Rights Watch the center accepts some but not all older children:

I don’t take over 18s, and I don’t take married or widowed [girls under 18] because they cause problems. They bring me some boys who have committed crimes, finished their sentences, and are waiting for deportation. I try not to accept them but I can’t say no. The social observation home should be monitoring when they will be released and make preparations for their deportation. I’ve spoken to them about this, and now it is better than it was, but we still get cases.²⁶⁷

A Saudi-born Chadian resident of Jeddah told Human Rights Watch that Saudi authorities detained his disabled 12-year-old brother for three weeks in the adult deportation center in 2006.²⁶⁸   

A social worker at the Jeddah Residential Center for Child Beggars said that Saudi authorities commonly detained small children with their mothers at Jeddah’s women’s deportation center, adding, “We get small children when they come with the father because there is no place for the child at the men’s deportation center.”²⁶⁹ A recent UNICEF study describes a similar process, but said that boys or girls of any age who are arrested with a male adult family member are sent to the Jeddah Residential Center pending deportation with the adult. The UNICEF study did not resolve the apparent contradiction between this assertion and the assertion in the same report that the Jeddah center only accepts children under age 15.²⁷⁰

Human Rights Watch requested but did not receive permission to visit the Jeddah Deportation Center to evaluate conditions there. The facility is reputed to be extremely overcrowded, with insufficient toilets, and provides no beds or bedding.²⁷¹ According to a government official, in June 2007 the facility held “nearly 8,000 [visa] overstayers,” well above its 5,500 capacity.²⁷²