Editorial
Transfer juvenile offenders
to correction centres
In 2003, a seven-point directive was issued by the High Court instructing the government to ensure that all juvenile prisoners are transferred from jail to correction centres forthwith. It has been five years since the directive was issued a nd yet, as a report in Sunday’s New Age points out, about 350 children still remain in prison. What makes it worse is the fact that a number of these children are in jail on charges that are bailable and also, laws stipulate that juvenile prisoners can be granted bail on charges that are normally non-bailable.
The High Court directive of 2003 was extremely clear. It stated that ‘juveniles accused are to be transferred to correction homes and other approved homes with utmost expedition’ and that ‘juveniles accused in jails must be kept apart from other prisoners’. However, the plight of juvenile prisoners has been ignored completely by successive governments and the prison authorities. We may have been able to understand the need to keep the juvenile offenders in jail if the correction facilities were overcrowded. However, it is the country’s prisons that are overcrowded while the three state-run juvenile correction centres, which have a combined capacity of 700, currently have fewer than 300 inmates. On June 16, New Age reported that the military-controlled interim government was contemplating freeing convicts who had completed half of their terms in order to create space in our overcrowded prisons. We wonder why the government did not think of freeing juvenile offenders first, or at least of transferring them to correction facilities to free up some space.
We have also argued on several occasions the need for juvenile courts to deal with young delinquents and the need for transferring them to proper correction centres. It has also been brought to the notice of the authorities concerned that prison is no place for children. Food, hygiene and sanitary conditions are absolutely dismal in our prisons system. Criminal activities are carried out inside the cells, often in the full knowledge of prison authorities and sometimes with the direct involvement of corrupt jail officials and staff. There are even allegations that illegal drugs are easily available inside prisons. Also, according to experts, the company of hardcore criminals is very likely to negatively impact the young detainees. While we read the reports of how terrible a place our prisons are, we cannot but feel horrified imagining what these young prisoners, many of whom may not even be criminals as street children are often arbitrarily picked up by law enforcers and sent to jail, have to go through. If we are certain of one thing, it is that sending juvenile offenders to our jails cannot be the right way to rectify them. This practice can only do long-term psychological damage to the children.
The law adviser, who himself played an active role and earned appreciation for his contribution to the 2003 High Court verdict, has reportedly said that initiatives would be taken to expedite the process and implement the court order. However, we are yet to see any positive outcome. Too long a period has passed, too many children have suffered. It is high time that the authorities concerned take steps to shift these young ‘offenders’ from jails to correction centres in an effort to properly rehabilitate them.
Patriotic drill missing in schools
Even if a single secondary school or madrassah in the country was failing to hold morning assemblies accompanied by the singing of the national anthem, it should have drawn the attention of the authorities. The fact, though, is that morning assembly is not held and national anthem not sung in most institutions across the country, as reported in New Age on Saturday. This is something that cannot be taken lightly. The report also mentions that some institutions are ignorant of their obligation in this regard while in some other institutions, the national anthem is sung ‘in their own way’. Teachers of some institutions confessed their ‘callousness’ over the matter and some said the absence of physical training instructors was the cause. No doubt there should be physical training instructors in every school but their non-recruitment or absence cannot be the ground for not holding morning assemblies, just as absence of a particular teacher must not prevent a school from completing the course curriculum.
But the teachers and schools alone are not to blame; the schools are supposed to be periodically inspected and held accountable not only for teaching standards but also for overall management and discipline. Morning assemblies are very important in this regard. Students assemble at a particular time and disassemble at a particular time, which itself is a lesson in group activity not contained in text books. Though some teachers have admitted to their callousness, the directorate of education is yet to do so.
It is unfortunate that school managements and teachers are so unpardonably oblivious of one of their primary duties. The significance of singing the national anthem is immense. We want our young citizens to grow up into responsible and patriotic men and women but we fail to create the requisite atmosphere. Students must be imbued with patriotism and a sense of belonging from when they are young. This is the rationale behind the holding of morning assemblies and singing the national anthem; these are not empty rituals. The sense of national identity is not only a matter of being given an ID card, but has to be laboriously inculcated so that young minds are not swayed by ethnic or communal prejudices. If schools neglect to do so, whom will the students turn to? The forces of globalisation are already having the effect of eroding, directly or otherwise, the nation’s cultural identity. Besides, there are the influences of Islamist fundamentalism which constrict the mind. Never before perhaps were the short exercises of holding a morning assembly and singing the national anthem before entering the classroom more appropriate and necessary than now.
The G8 at Hokkaido: an
exercise in escapism
The final communiqué from the Hokkaido G8 summit thoroughly exposed the lack of policy or political imagination of the G8 leaders. The world requires more accountable, imaginative and multilateral processes to address the issues of injustice, poverty and environmental crisis, writes John Samuel
The meeting of G8 leaders in Hokkaido, Japan, proved to be an exercise in escapism. The final communiqué of the G8 leaders is more of a recycled rhetoric of broken promises. This meeting, held in the midst of financial, fuel, food and climate crises, failed to recognise the gravity of these crises. The G8 leaders’ posturing of confidence will not help to solve these issues. This would further increase the legitimacy crisis of G8 as a credible forum to develop any viable solution for the ongoing problems of hunger and injustice- partly perpetuated by the corporate and institutional interests of G8 countries.
The original grouping of rich industrialised nations - G7, emerged in the context of the oil crisis of the 1970’s. Now after almost thirty years, G8 — which includes the co-opted Russia — faces the challenge of being responsible to address the looming crises of finance, fuel and food. The balance sheet of G8 in the last thirty years clearly shows that G8 as an institutionalised venue failed to provide any meaningful solution to the issues of poverty, war, inequities and injustice that confront the world. While they have managed to impose the neoliberal policy paradigm — with the strategic use of World Bank and IMF conditionalities — on the developing world and poor nations of the world, they have not been able to do anything substantial to address trade inequities, aid diversion and debt trap. In fact, G8 leaders, instead of solving these issues, often used their Summits to push the interests of the rich countries, with lots of window dressing and rhetoric about poverty reduction, and more aid for the poor countries. In 2005, they promised to write off the debt and double the aid to Africa to address issues of poverty, disease and sustainable development. After three years, these leaders stand exposed in the graveyard of broken promises.
Though a new grouping of G5 countries, including India, China, South Africa, Brazil and Mexico are being co-opted in to the periphery of the G8 Summits, the G5 countries too failed to influence the agenda or outcome of the G8 process. So it is high time for the G5 countries to ponder the very validity of being in the periphery of the G8 Summit- legitimising the agenda setting role of the rich and powerful countries. Instead of playing second fiddle to the rich American-European axis and a co-opted Japan, it is high time for G5 to explore the option of reviving the G20 process as an alternate option to discuss and to adopt collective measures to address the issues that confront humanity and the world. This requires a fresh set of imaginations and political will from the part of the G5 leaders.
The Hokkaido summit happened in the midst of international policy and political crisis. Though G8 leaders claim that it is the grouping of the democratic and developed nations of the world, the irony of the G8 is that it is one of the most undemocratic of global processes. The leaders neither discuss the key issues in their parliament nor involve citizens or civil society in deciding the agenda for the meeting. The public rating of many leaders, including that of US president George W Bush and Japanese prime minister Yasuo Fukuda, is at the lowest. The fact that G8 summits are held in the far away luxury spots, fearing citizens and peoples’ action show that they are insulated from the people and the process of democratic culture. This year an estimated US$250 million was spent by Japan for security alone. The leaders addressed the press through video conferencing facilities rather than facing journalist. Why should the ‘leaders of the world’ be afraid of people on whose behalf they are supposed to take decisions? Such a situation seems to indicate their lack of democratic credentials and legitimacy to represent the peoples of their countries or to take decision on their behalf. Authority without accountability and transparency is essentially anti-democratic in its very content and form. So the G8 Summit itself failed to meet any standards of democratic process or accountable governance.
Only three short years after G8 pledged to ‘make poverty history” at Gleneagles in 2005, the spiraling food and fuel prices are exacerbating poverty. The G8 has done nothing to stop it. The ranks of the hungry have swelled to 950 million this year and it is estimated that another 750 million are now at the risk of falling into chronic hunger. As many as 1.7 billion people, or one of every four persons in the world, may now lack basic food security. In fact, the so-called food crisis is a symptom of a deeper crisis of finance capital and speculative commodity market. Over a period of the last twenty years, most of the marginal farmers and small agricultural producers have been slow poisoned through systematic withdrawal of support systems and subsidies, as a part of the neo-liberal structural adjustment programmes imposed on the developing world and poor countries by the G8 forces and WB /IMF as their extensions. The climate crisis was used as an opportunity to subsidies the rich farmers through biofuel subsidies. The rising food prices are driven partly due to new appetite for biofuel power to fuel their cars. The corn needed to fill up a car tank with ethanol could feed a hungry person for a year. This, in effect, makes biofuels the new poison that can undermine the food security of millions of people and steal their food and lives. It is imperative to stop all subsidies for biofuels, primarily by the US government. It is also important to declare a moratorium on the diversion of agricultural land for biofuel monocropping.
Though there has been lots of discussion about climate change, G8 leaders simply failed to walk their talk. The G8 countries’ failure to reduce green house gas emissions is already wreaking havoc on agriculture through severe floods, droughts and rising temperatures. The carbon emissions from G8 countries make up 40 per cent of the world’s total emissions. And yet only 13 per cent of the world’s population lives in G8 countries. Not only are G8 countries responsible for large scale pollution, they are also failing to compensate poor countries that are bearing the brunt of the G8 Countries’ dirty emission. Though G8 countries have promised that they will halve emissions by 2050, it might be too little and too late to meet the challenge of climate change. So the promise of 2050 is more of an act of escapist stalling tactic, rather than real commitment to act on the climate crisis. While the environmental and economic viability of nuclear power generation is increasingly questioned in their own countries, it seems G8 is once again pedaling nuclear power generation as a response to climate crisis. When we locate this in the context of the proposed civil nuclear deal with India and the US, it is clear that many of the G8 countries seem to be more keen to market their old nuclear reactors to emerging markets such as India.
The final communiqué from the Hokkaido G8 summit thoroughly exposed the lack of policy or political imagination of the G8 leaders. The communiqué also signified their lack of political will and the deficit of moral and political legitimacy to act as the leaders of the world. So the pertinent question is whether G8 is a part of the problem or part of the solution. The Hokkaido Summit seems to suggest that the G8 is more keen to remain as a part of the problem. The world requires more accountable, imaginative and multilateral processes to address the issues of injustice, poverty and environmental crisis. The answer should lie more in reforming the multilateral United Nations process, rather than quasi global governance posturing of the G8 leaders.
John Samuel is the international director of Actionaid
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