Song Saturday; Johnny Cash

 

Song Saturday; Johnny Cash

There can’t be many people left who do not know that children are held in Guantanamo Bay, but Omar al-Khadr  (the 15 year old Canadian detainee) has been in the news again recently. This is why I have chosen this as my ‘Song Saturday’. It’s just a gentle reminder for the rest of us whose lives are free from unlawful imprisonment, persecution, intimidation, interrogation and torture that not every one, not even all children, enjoy the basic freedoms we all take for granted. I love this song anyway, and I’m a great Johnny Cash fan, it just seems to sit well with this news article.

Exerts taken from BBC World News

• Oliver Burkeman in Washington
• The Guardian,
• Thursday April 24,
• 
  

Children younger than 16 are being held as "enemy combatants" in the American detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, the US military admitted yesterday, a practice human rights groups condemned as repugnant and illegal.

Three boys aged between 13 and 15 are among about 660 inmates at the controversial camp, a US military official told the Guardian, on condition of anonymity. The official would not disclose their nationalities but said they had been brought from Afghanistan this year on suspicion of terrorism.  The children would be held indefinitely and would not be granted access to lawyers, he said, because the US continues to view them as "enemy combatants" - a term it has used to argue that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the inmates, who have not been charged with any crimes.

Holding the children was "wholly repugnant and contrary to basic principles of human rights," said Angela Wright of Amnesty International, and contravened UN rules with "near-universal acceptance" regarding the treatment of juveniles.

The United States and Somalia are the only member states of the United Nations no to have ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The three boys are not the only inmates under 16 to have been brought to Guantanamo Bay. Canadian officials have been seeking for months to gain access to Omar al-Khadr, a Canadian national who they say is being held at Camp Delta after being captured on July 27 during fighting in eastern Afghanistan. He was 15 at the time.