El Salvador has published a new law that will allow authorities to penalise minors as young as 12 with life imprisonment for severe crimes, including homicide, terrorism or rape. On Tuesday, the Salvadoran government released the law, which is slated to take effect on April 26. The change is part of a suite of hardline policies designed to stamp out gang violence in El Salvador.
But critics have warned that such measures risk perpetuating grave human rights abuses. Since March 2022, El Salvador has been under a state of emergency that has suspended certain civil liberties in favour of greater police and military powers. Initially designed to last 30 days, the state of emergency has been renewed dozens of times.
And over that time, El Salvador’s government has carried out a campaign of mass arrest and imprisonment. More than 90,000 people have been imprisoned. Groups like Human Rights Watch estimate that nearly 1.9 percent of the population is behind bars, one of the highest rates in the world.
Some detainees are held without charges. Others have been processed in mass trials, a process approved in 2023 to allow up to 900 people to be tried at once. The life sentences for minors was approved as part of a constitutional amendment in March, championed by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele.
The country’s legislative assembly is overwhelmingly controlled by Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party. On social media that month, Bukele denounced the amendment’s opponents as lenient towards violent crime. But in the days that followed its passage, groups including the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) voiced “deep concern” for the prospect that children could be sentenced to life behind bars.
UNICEF warned that imprisonment could result in severe, long-term consequences on child and adolescent development, and added that such measures were unlikely to reduce crime overall. Human rights monitors have repeatedly called on Bukele and the Salvadoran government to put an end to its state of emergency and related anti-crime measures, arguing they violate fundamental human rights. Just last month, the International Group of Experts for the Investigation of Human Rights Violations under the State of Emergency in El Salvador (GIPES) published its final report, which alleged that crimes against humanity had been committed over the last four years.
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