Staff reporter
FIVE Cyprus women’s organisations have asked President Glafcos Clerides to intervene to end the “inhuman conditions” for 11 children of the 49 boat people who have been detained under virtual house arrest in Limassol’s Pefkos Hotel since June.
The letter is a “first step” towards getting Cyprus to treat humanely the remainder of the 113 boat people who were rescued, sick and starving, from a trawler off the Cyprus coast in June, Anthoula Papadopoulou told the Cyprus Mail yesterday.
The letter, sent last Friday and made public yesterday, asked Clerides to push the Welfare Services and the Immigration department to “safeguard the rights” of the 11 children in the hotel under two international conventions, which Cyprus signed. The children range from one month to 16 years of age.
In their five months of “illegal” detention, the children “have been deprived of all their human rights,” under both the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Declaration of Human Rights, Papadopoulou, a member of the Immigrant Support Action Group (ISAG), said.
Papadopoulou also noted that Attorney-general Alecos Markides had not released any results from his two investigations into alleged police violations of the boat peoples’ human rights in two separate beating incidents.
The Convention, which Cyprus signed in 1990, requires children being kept in immigration custody be given freedom of movement along with education, entertainment and an emotionally healthy environment, she said.
Their “imprisonment and house arrest” since June has left them “scared and very withdrawn,” she said, adding that if they emerge without permanent scars, it would be due to the unofficial small kindnesses shown them by some of the police guarding them.
“No child should constitute an object of political handling, literally under lock and key for four months in a hotel,” the letter to Clerides declared.
“We call on you, Mr President, to intervene so that the government responds to its basic obligations emanating from the Convention,” it urged. And it issued a “demand” that both the Ministry of Education school the children, and the Welfare Services Department “take a more active role” in protecting them.
“We are certain, Mr President, that with your advice and intervention,” Cyprus will keep its commitments to the children under the two treaties, the letter added.
It was only this weekend – for the first time in over five months – that the children were allowed outside the Pefkos Hotel, Papadopoulou said. They went to a Limassol park and the city zoo.
Perhaps in response to the letter sent last Friday to Clerides, five of the school-age immigrant children in the hotel were sent to school yesterday – also for the first time in five months – Pefkos Hotel owner/manager Neophytos Efstathiou said.
And on Sunday, three of the mothers in the hotel were allowed outside for short walks with some of the children, Papadopoulou said. “They were really crazy about open spaces,” after five months of police guard, she added.
The letter to Clerides emerged from a November 14 meeting of ISAG, the Pancyprian Federation of Women’s Organisations (POGO, an Akel group), the Women’s Organisation of the United Democrats, the Women Trade Unionists of PEO, and the Association for Preventing and Combatting Family Violence.
Some of the 113 boat people have been deported. Larnaca police are holding 42 of them in several facilities. One is the old Famagusta detention centre, where rapid-reaction (Mmad) police beat 48 of them in quelling a riot there on October 24. Several months earlier, police beat many of the 49 boat people still living in the Pefkos Hotel after disturbances.
It is believed that all those in Larnaca police detention, as well as 40 of the 49 in the Pefkos Hotel were not considered asylum candidates by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and are subject to deportation as “economic refugees.”
