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Each year, hundreds of Palestinian children from the Occupied Palestinian Territories are arrested, interrogated, and imprisoned by the Israeli military authorities. Since 1992, Defence for Children International/Palestine Section (DCI/PS) has represented many of these children in Israeli military courts, monitored the conditions of their detention, and intervened with relevant institutions and government bodies in order to improve their situation.
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In the period from 1998 to 2000, there was a 183% increase in the number of cases received by DCI/PS (89 in 1998 to 252 in 2000). In addition, there was a serious increase in the number of children arrested between the ages of 13 and 14. In 1999, arrested children aged 13 and 14 represented 9.90% of all DCI/PS cases. In the year 2000, that figure increased to 21.83%.
Moreover, there is a marked increase in the length of sentences received by Palestinian children. In 1999, the majority of cases (43.51%) received sentences of less than one month, with 30.53% receiving between 1 to 6 months. In 2000, however, the percentage of cases receiving less than one month decreased to 35.48%, while the number receiving between six months to one year increased from 19.08% to 40.3%, thus constituting the majority.
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The fiction of justice is maintained through bureaucratic procedures, judges, trials, signed documents and confessions. But when confessions are extracted through torture, and when documents are signed but written in a language the signatory does not understand, the emptiness of this framework is manifest. When the bureaucratic procedures serve only to emphasize to the one being shunted through them that they are subject to the caprice and power of the state and its functionaries, and when the judges do not even pretend to be even-handed or offer objective consideration of cases before them, this farce of justice is written--from the beginning-- as tragedy.
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http://www.wrmea.com/html/palestinian_child_prisoners_in_israel.htm