A court in Myanmar (formerly Burma) has sentenced a dozen children from the Rohingya minority to prison terms of between two and three years for traveling without documents, the official press reported on Tuesday.
The children, five of whom are under the age of 13, are part of a group of 112 Rohingya detained in December in the southeastern region of Bogale, near the Irrawaddy River delta in the Andaman Sea, while traveling in a speedboat with the intention of proceeding to Malaysia.
The court sentenced the five under-13s to two years in prison, while the seven under-17s received three-year sentences, The Global New Light newspaper reported.
The newspaper, controlled by the military since the February 2021 coup, indicated that the minors were transferred on Sunday from a prison to an education center for minors in the city of Rangoon.
The adults, 53 men and 47 women, were sentenced to five years in prison in a decision announced on Friday, the newspaper reported.
The Burmese authorities do not recognize the citizenship of the Rohingya community, which is believed to be descended from illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, subjecting the Muslim minority to restrictions on freedom of movement, health and education.
A boat carrying more than 184 Rohingya, many of them women and children, disembarked in Indonesia’s northwest Aceh province on Sunday. The group was moved to a nearby location for temporary shelter.
This is the third known group to arrive in Aceh recently, following the arrival on December 25 of a boat carrying 57 Rohingya, a day after a first boat carrying 174 of Myanmar’s persecuted Muslim minority.
In August 2017, the Burmese army launched a military campaign against the Rohingya population in northern Rakhine State. The country is currently facing a charge of genocide before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
The brutal military operation led to the exodus of more than 720,000 refugees to neighboring Bangladesh, many of whom remain in the world’s largest refugee camp complex in the Cox’s Bazar region of the country’s southeast.
The coup on February 1, 2021 plunged Myanmar into a deep political, social and economic crisis and opened a spiral of violence, with new civilian militias that exacerbated the guerrilla war that the country has been experiencing for decades.
At least 2,707 people died in the brutal repression by the security forces and more than 13,270 remain in detention, according to the latest update from the Association for Aid to Political Prisoners (AAPP).
Source: TSF
