Children's Rights, State Criminality and Settler Colonialism: Violence and Child Arrest in Occupied East Jerusalem

Bella Kovner,Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

doi:10.13169/statecrime.5.1.0109

Abstract

Over the past few years, Palestinian children in Occupied East Jerusalem (OEJ) have faced high rates of arrest. The article examines violence against children during arrest by juxtaposing state official documents recording debates and analyses of children's rights with published reports by human rights and civil society organizations. The article suggests that arrested children in OEJ suffer from three intersecting discriminatory regimes: structural discrimination that targets them as criminals based on their ethnicity; a lack of assistance as they fall under the responsibility of neither the Palestinian nor the Israeli socio-legal systems; and limited access to welfare, justice, and educational opportunities. The article concludes by suggesting that Palestinian children face severe structural violence that amounts to state-hate criminality.

Highlights

Armed conflict and political violence are among the most disruptive obstacles to children’s healthy development (Maslen 1996: 332)
Textual analysis is a means for researchers to gather information about how other human beings make sense of the world, and in our case, to define the characteristics of Occupied East Jerusalem (OEJ) that shape the conditions for child arrests
Palestinian children in OEJ suffer from three-tiered oppression, which increases the likelihood of their arrest and detainment by Israeli police forces

Summary

Introduction

Armed conflict and political violence are among the most disruptive obstacles to children’s healthy development (Maslen 1996: 332). Over the past few years, Palestinian children in Occupied East Jerusalem (OEJ) have been targeted by the Israeli criminal justice system. A severe escalation in violence, which worsened in July 2014 following the kidnapping and murder of 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdir against the backdrop of the fighting in Gaza, was dubbed in 2015 as “the Jerusalem Intifada” (Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) 2015: 12).. This article examines violence against children by juxtaposing state official documents recording debates and analyses of children’s rights with published reports by human rights and civil society organizations. The purpose of the study was to analyse state official documents recording debates to enable us to address the following question: What are the unique characteristics of OEJ in relation to child arrest?. The analysis presented in this article will review the various stages and components of juvenile justice proceedings in OEJ while juxtaposing both official state.

Objectives

Methods

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Conclusion