Ian Lucas – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Ian Lucas on 2014-07-16.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what recent assessment he has made of the implementation of each of the recommendations in the report, Children in Military Custody, published in June 2012.

Mr Tobias Ellwood

The UK has made repeated representations to Israel on their treatment of Palestinian prisoners, including child detainees. Since the Foreign and Commonwealth Office-funded independent report on Children in Military Custody, there has been some limited progress. This includes a pilot to use summons instead of night-time arrests, and steps to reduce the amount of time a child can be detained before seeing a judge. My predecessor wrote to the Israeli Attorney General on 31 March to welcome the steps taken to date and to call for further measures, including the mandatory use of audio-visual recording of interrogations, investigation into continued reports of single hand ties being used, and an end to solitary confinement for children. The British Government has been working with the delegation who compiled the Children in Military Custody report to make a return visit to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories in the near future.