The Grahamstown High Court ordered the immediate release on Monday of 25 children who have been languishing in jail for up to four years while waiting to serve lesser sentences in non-existent reform schools.
It emerged in court papers that the Eastern Cape had only one place of safety for children and no reform schools whatsoever. The Legal Resources Centre’s advocate Mark Euijen and advocate Gerald Bloem argued that the lack of reform schools in the province rendered almost impossible the implementation of court referrals of children to such institutions. The court had asked for argument on
behalf of the sentenced juvenile offenders.
It was pointed out that in the Eastern Cape the only proper place of safety for children is the 58-bed Port Elizabeth facility, Enkuselweni. While, by law, children awaiting transfer to a reform school should be held in a place of safety, most in the Eastern Cape are forced to go to jail. There they await a transfer to reform school
that, more often than not, will never come through.
The court papers suggested that the circumstances of the incarceration of many of these juveniles ”may be unlawful in many cases and is certainly undesirable in all of them”.
Judges Dylan Chetty, Ronnie Pillay and Bonisile Sandi ordered the immediate release of 25 of these children who had already spent between 20 months and four years in jail.
In nine of these cases, the children had been held for more than two years despite the fact that the Criminal Procedure Act specifies that an order referring children to reform school lapses after this time. – Sapa