Andy Slaughter – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Andy Slaughter on 2015-11-17.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, how many of the (a) core recommendations and (b) specific recommendations of his Department’s report entitled Children in Military Custody, published in June 2012, the Israeli government has implemented.

Mr Tobias Ellwood

Since the publication of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office-funded independent report on Children in Military Custody in June 2012, there has been some progress on the issue of children held in military detention. This includes a pilot to use summons instead of night-time arrests, changes to standard operating procedures on methods of restraint, and steps to reduce the amount of time a child can be detained before seeing a judge. There has also been a reduction in the use of solitary confinement and an increase in the use of Arabic to give notifications of arrest.

While we welcome the improvements to date, we continue to press the Israeli authorities to make further progress on this important issue.