AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION
COALITION TO STOP THE USE OF CHILD SOLDIERS
HUMAN RIGHTS FIRST
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
Leading Rights Groups Urge Obama to Stop Guantanamo Proceedings Against Child Soldiers
Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers
Lucia Withers, +44 207 367 4116
Human Rights First, Deborah Colson, 212-845-5247
Colsond@humanrights first.org
Human Rights Watch, Jennifer Daskal, 202-612-4349
(Washington) -- Five leading human rights and civil liberties groups delivered a letter to President-elect Barack Obama on Jan. 12, 2009, urging him to suspend the Guantanamo Bay military commissions and to ensure that the upcoming trial of Omar Khadr, a 22-year-old Canadian, does not proceed. The trial is scheduled to begin on Jan. 26, six days after the presidential inauguration.
Khadr is slated to be tried before the widely discredited military commissions for war crimes he is alleged to have committed when he was 15. There is broad global recognition that the recruitment and use of children in armed conflict is a serious abuse in itself. This is reflected in the fact that no existing international tribunal has ever prosecuted a child for war crimes.
The groups - the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, Human Rights First and Human Rights Watch - urged the president-elect to drop the military commission charges against Khadr and either repatriate him to Canada or, if there is evidence to support it, to prosecute him in U.S. federal courts in accordance with international juvenile justice and fair trial standards.
The groups also called on President-elect Obama to immediately suspend pending proceedings against Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan who is also charged before the military commissions for crimes allegedly committed when he was 16 or 17. A military judge twice ruled that statements Jawad made following his arrest were not admissible at trial because they were obtained through torture. However, the government has challenged the ruling and the Court of Military Commission Review in Washington, D.C., is scheduled to hear arguments on Tuesday, Jan.13.
To read the letter from the human rights groups to President-elect Barack Obama, please see:
here
For Amnesty International' s reports on Omar Khadr and Mohammed Jawad, see:
In whose best interests? Omar Khadr, child "enemy combatant" facing military commission, April 2008,
here
From ill-treatment to unfair trial. The case of Mohammed Jawad, child "enemy combatant", August 2008,
here
Amnesty International is a Nobel Peace Prize-winning grassroots activist
organization with more than 2.2 million supporters, activists and volunteers in more than 150 countries campaigning for human rights worldwide. The organization investigates and exposes abuses, educates and mobilizes the public, and works to protect people wherever justice, freedom, truth and dignity are denied.
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For more information, please visit: www.amnestyusa. org/100days
