GC2020 Resolution on Child Incarceration

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Global Efforts Needed to Free Detained Children

In 2019, the United Nations published a 23-page report about the global crisis of child incarceration. This article from Human Rights Watch gives an overview of that report in 3 pages - read the article online or download it.

Download the full UN report.

United Methodist General Conference 2024:
Legislation & Resources on Israel/Palestine

Watch this video (5.5 minutes) from Human Rights Watch to see and hear what happens to some of the 1.5 million children around the world who are locked up each year.

Jennifer Bing of American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) makes the connection between what has been happening to migrant children in the US and Palestinian kids in the Holy Land. Read the editorial online at Truthout or download it.

Whereas the Nobel Prize winning non-profit organization Human Rights Watch reported that thousands of Palestinian children, some as young as 12 years old, have been taken from homes and villages in their own land since 2000, and

Whereas it has been independently documented that many of the children have been abused by the Israeli military or by settlers, and

Whereas the children who are removed from their homes are taken to settlements or to interrogation sites, and sometimes into Israel which is a war crime according to the Fourth Geneva Convention, and

Whereas UNICEF, Amnesty International, Defense for children International-Palestine, and other respected human rights organizations have documented that the children are often held for an extended time, some with no lawyer and without the presence or even knowledge of their parents, or held in administrative detention, without any charges being brought, and

Whereas the Social Principles of the United Methodist Church explicitly affirms the rights of children (¶162C Book of Discipline 2016), and

Whereas United Methodist Women have made the issues of incarceration of racial minorities and the well-being of children and young people as two of their priorities for the 2016-2020 quadrennium, and

Whereas the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child has been ratified by every member of the United Nations except the United States, and

Whereas in the previous quadrennium legislation has been introduced and reintroduced in the United States Congress that seeks to prevent the United States from financing or contributing to any nation’s, including Israel’s, use of military detention, in the interrogation, abuse, and ill-treatment of children, including Palestinian children, in violation of international law, and

Whereas the United Methodist baptismal covenant binds us to accept the freedom and power God gives us to “resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves,”

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the 2020 General Conference of the United Methodist Church charges the General Board of Church and Society, in consultation with the General Board of Global Ministries and United Methodist Women, to formulate a plan that addresses:

A. how best to educate and inform United Methodists around the issue of Palestinian child incarceration;

B. how best to interact with lawmakers and leaders around the world but particularly in the United States on the issue of Palestinian child incarceration;

C. possible actions United Methodists can take to avoid contributing to the suffering, abuse and

imprisonment of Palestinian children or other children subject to military detention.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that recommendations produced by the aforementioned consultation be brought to the 2024 General Conference of the United Methodist Church for review and/or action.

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Migrant children who crossed the US-Mexico border with their parents illegally were taken from their parents by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol and incarcerated in cages.

(AFP/Getty Images/Washington Post)