Latest news with #childrenrights
The National
30-06-2025
- Politics
- The National
Dubai sets up specialised division for child protection
on Monday established a specialised division for registering child protection cases. The division will focus on children under the age of 18 who are involved in legal cases or have had court orders issued against them or their families based on submitted petitions. The move, which seeks to ensure the safeguarding of children's rights while ensuring their well-being, will see the division as a central entity following up on cases of children exposed to neglect, violence or deprivation of basic rights. It is expected to enhance the co-ordination between Dubai Courts and partner entities while increasing the efficiency of the response to sensitive cases, state news agency Wam reported. Dubai's judicial system attaches the utmost importance to protecting children's rights, Mohammed Al Obaidli, executive director of the litigation management sector at Dubai Courts, said. He added that the division will support decision-making and the continuous development of policies and procedures related to child protection, while reducing the likelihood of further harm resulting from delayed judicial procedures.
Daily Mail
26-06-2025
- Daily Mail
Nursery teacher 'who made one child's hair fall out due to physical abuse' is caught on CCTV hitting and slapping two-year-olds, prompting police investigation
A nursery school 'teacher from hell' is under criminal investigation after harrowing CCTV footage showed her 'beating two year old children' in her care. The teacher - named as Zhanel Musken, 29 - hit and slapped the infants, pulled their hair, shook and pushed them, and roughly changed their clothes, it is alleged. A total of 15 suffered injuries, revealed Saule Shakeneva, the regional children's rights commissioner in Pavlodar, Kazakhstan. 'The number of children may well increase,' she warned. The teacher was suspended after distraught parents complained to police. Footage of the alleged abuse was then seized by police from Kindergarten Number 116 in Pavlodar. It shows fear on the faces of children as the teacher conducted her alleged reign of terror in the classroom. She faces a possible jail sentence if convicted of abusing the infants. She is said to have ten years of experience of working with children, despite her alleged violence In one terrifying instance, the woman aggressively shakes one child's head continuously before yanking them to the ground. Another disturbing scene shows her pulling a boy's ears and screaming at him as the scared boy tries to avoid her gaze. She violently pulls off other kids' outfits, forcefully pulls their arms, and hits their midsection as their frightened friends look on. Further footage sees her vigorously grab a boy's feet as he tumbles on the floor, hitting his head. 'Most of the children are too young to speak properly yet,' said a local report citing Shakeneva. Yet some parents were concerned by bruises and the behaviour of their children. 'The children were assigned a forensic medical examination, and the parents and children were offered psychological help,' said the report. The teacher was reported to be experienced, with ten years working in nursery schools, and was seen as caring before the scandal was revealed. Khava Bolkoyeva, aunt of an 'abused' child, told local TV: 'She hit [my niece] on the head, on the back, threw her around, as if she wasn't a real person but some kind of toy. 'She has almost no hair because it was constantly being pulled. 'There are bruises on her body and she constantly complains about her stomach. Maybe she throws her around, hits her. 'We were at the examination this morning. Now we have written to the prosecutor's office and we are going to a lawyer. We want to see this case through to the end.' She added: 'This is a video of just one day. And she does all this without fear of the cameras. 'It is scary to imagine how often she allowed herself such violence.' The teacher could face charges of 'failure to fulfil the duties of raising a minor by the person to whom they are assigned'. But parents want to see children abuse laws used against the teacher for the alleged beatings.
Al Jazeera
10-06-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Ukraine says Russia took 20,000 children during war. Will some be returned?
Kyiv, Ukraine – Russian President Vladimir Putin faces criminal charges for the 'unlawful deportation and transfer of children'. That is the definition of the 2023 arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court, the intergovernmental tribunal based in The Hague. On June 2, as ceasefire talks rumbled on, Ukrainian diplomats handed their Russian counterparts a list of hundreds of children that they said were taken from Russia-occupied Ukrainian regions since 2022. The return of these children 'could become the first test of the sincerity of [Russia's] intentions' to reach a peace settlement, Andriy Yermak, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's chief of staff, told media. 'The ball is in Russia's corner.' But Ukraine claims the number of children taken by Russia is much higher. Kyiv has so far identified 19,546 children who it says were forcibly taken from Russia-occupied Ukrainian regions since 2022. The list could be far from final, as Ukrainian officials believe that some children lost their parents during the hostilities and cannot get in touch with their relatives in Ukraine. As of early June, only 1,345 children had returned home to Ukraine. But why did Russia take them in the first place? 'The aim is genocide of the Ukrainian people through Ukrainian children,' Daria Herasymchuk, a presidential adviser on children's rights, told Al Jazeera. 'Everybody understands that if you take children away from a nation, the nation will not exist.' Putin, his allies and Kremlin-backed media insist that Ukraine is an 'artificial state' with no cultural and ethnic identity. Russian officials who run orphanages, foster homes and facilitate adoptions are being accused of changing the Ukrainian children's names to deprive them of access to relatives. 'Russians do absolutely everything to erase the children's identity,' Herasymchuk said. The Reckoning Project, a global team of journalists and lawyers documenting, publicising and building cases of alleged war crimes Russia commits in Ukraine, said 'indoctrination' is at play. 'The system is in the aspects of indoctrination, the re-education of children, when they are deprived of a certain identity that they had in Ukraine, and another identity, a Russian one, is imposed upon them,' Viktoria Novikova, the Reckoning Project's senior researcher, told Al Jazeera. Russia's ultimate goal is to 'turn their enemy, the Ukrainians, into their friend, so that these children think that Ukraine is an enemy so that [Russia] can seize all of Ukraine', she said. A group of researchers at Yale University that helps locate the children agrees that the alleged abductions 'may constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity'. Moscow conducts a 'systematic campaign of forcibly moving children from Ukraine into Russia, fracturing their connection to Ukrainian language and heritage through 're-education', and even disconnecting children from their Ukrainian identities through adoption,' said the Humanitarian Research Laboratory of the Yale School of Public Health. The group has located some 8,400 children in five dozen facilities in Russia and Belarus, Moscow's closest ally. In 2022, Sergey Mironov, head of A Just Russia, a pro-Kremlin party, adopted a 10-month-old girl named Marharyta Prokopenko, according to the Vaznye Istorii online magazine. The girl was taken from an orphanage in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson that was occupied at the time. Her name was changed to Marina Mironova, the magazine reported. The girl's name is on the June 2 list. The alleged abductions are far from 'chaotic' and follow detailed scenarios, Herasymchuk said. She said some children are taken from parents who refuse to collaborate with Moscow-installed 'administrations' in Russia-occupied areas. During this 'filtration' procedure, she alleged that Russian intelligence and military officers and Ukrainian collaborators interrogate and 'torture' the parents, checking their bodies for pro-Ukrainian tattoos or bruises left by recoiling firearms. Viktoria Obidina, a 29-year-old military nurse taken prisoner after failing a 'filtration' that followed the 2022 siege of the southern city of Mariupol, feared such an abduction. She also thought that her daughter Alisa, who was four at the time, would witness her torture and then end up in a Russian orphanage. 'They could have tortured me near her or could have tortured her to make me do things,' Obidina told Al Jazeera after her release from Russian captivity in September 2022. Instead, she opted to hand Alisa to a complete stranger, a civilian woman who had already undergone the 'filtration' process and boarded a bus that took 10 days of endless stops and checks amid shelling and shooting to reach a Kyiv-controlled area. Another alleged method is 'summer camping', in which children in Russia-occupied areas are taken to Crimea or Russian cities along the Black Sea coast and are not returned to their parents, Herasymchuk claimed. Some parents plunge into the abyss of trying to reach Russia to get their kids back. But very few succeed, as Ukrainians trying to enter Russia are often barred from re-entry. Attempts to return a child are 'always a lottery', Herasymchuk said. Children of preschool age often do not remember their addresses and do not know how to reach out to their relatives, while teenagers are more inventive, she said. Ukrainian boys are especially vulnerable as they are seen as future soldiers who could fight against Ukraine, she said. 'All the boys undergo militarisation, they get summons from Russian conscription offices so that they become Russian soldiers and return to Ukraine,' she said. A return is often more feasible through a third nation such as Qatar, whose government has helped get dozens of children back home. On Wednesday, Russia's children's rights ombudswoman said she had received the list of 339 Ukrainian children. She denied that Russia had abducted tens of thousands of children. 'We see that there aren't 20,000-25,000 children; the list contains only 339 [names], and we will work thoroughly on each child,' Maria Lvova-Belova told the Tass news agency. In 2022, Lvova-Belova adopted a 15-year-old boy from Ukraine's Mariupol. Along with Putin, she is wanted by the International Criminal Court for her role in the alleged abductions. Ukrainian observers hope that the children's return may be one of the few positive things to come out of the stalled Ukraine-Russia peace talks, which were last held in Turkiye's Istanbul. 'Once everyone understands that no ceasefire is discussed in Istanbul, the Ukrainian side is trying to squeeze things out maximally out of the humanitarian track,' Vyacheslav Likhachyov told Al Jazeera.
