Burmese authorities have sentenced 112 people to prison terms ranging from two to five years because they were traveling without legal documents, the official newspaper ‘The Global New Light of Myanmar’ has reported.
The more than a hundred people, including 12 children and 47 women, were arrested in late December when they were in the south of the country in a motorboat intending to go to Malaysia.
The media report that among those convicted, all Rohingyas, there are five children under 13 years of age sentenced to two years in prison, while seven other minors – in this case over 13 years of age – have been sentenced to three years in prison. The rest, 53 men and 47 women, have been sentenced to five years imprisonment each.
The convicted children have been transferred from the prison where they were held to a youth education center in Rangoon, the country’s largest city.
The Rohingya are an ethnic minority of Muslim faith concentrated in Burma’s Rajine (or Arakan, as the Rohingya call it) state. Burma considers them to be descendants of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and does not recognize them as citizens, thus depriving them of basic rights.
The Burmese authorities are being investigated by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) this year after Gambia filed a complaint for alleged genocide of the Rohingya population in the Asian country.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
