(AFP) France has violated the rights of French children by leaving them for years in inhuman and life-threatening conditions in Syrian camps for family members of suspected jihadists, a UN watchdog said Thursday.
The UN child rights committee ruled that “France has the responsibility and power to protect the French children in the Syrian camps against an imminent risk to their lives by taking action to repatriate them.”
It stressed in a statement that “the prolonged detention of the child victims in life-threatening conditions also amounts to inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment.”
The committee, whose 18 independent experts are tasked with monitoring the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, issued its findings after considering three cases involving 49 French children held in Kurdish-controlled camps in Syria’s northeast.
