10 Jan. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Burmese authorities have sentenced 112 people to prison terms of between two and five years because they traveled without legal documents, according to the official newspaper ‘The Global New Light of Myanmar’.
The more than a hundred people, including 12 children and 47 women, were arrested at the end of December, when they were in the south of the country in a motor boat with the intention of going to Malaysia.
The aforementioned medium specifies that among those convicted, all Rohingyas, there are five children under 13 years of age sentenced to two years in prison, while another seven minors -in this case over thirteen years old- have been sentenced to three years. from prison. The rest, 53 men and 47 women, have been sentenced to five years in prison 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 the Muslim faith that is concentrated in the Burmese state of Rakhine (or Arakan, as the Rohingya call it). Burma considers them descendants of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and does not recognize them as citizens, thereby depriving them of basic rights.
The Burmese authorities are being investigated by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) this year after the Gambia filed a complaint for alleged genocide against the Rohingya population in the Asian country.
