Feydhoo Finolhu Correctional Training Centre for Children The Correctional Training Centre for Children currently detains 19 children between 15 and 18 years of age. Established in August 2009 and officially opened in July 2010, the facility is located on the island of Feydhoo Finolhu, 20 minutes by boat from the capital Male’. The tiny island is uninhabited and the only structure on it is the detention facility itself. The facility is run jointly by the Juvenile Justice Unit (JJU) of the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Child Protection Unit of the Maldives Police Service. The ethos behind the Juvenile Justice Unit is one of restorative justice rather than one of punishment. During consultative interviews, senior JJU and Home Ministry officials maintained that the focus on restorative justice has meant that children detained in the facility are provided with a formal learning environment where they are taught various academic subjects, so that they can return to school, or have better chances in the labour market when they are ready to return to society. They are also housed in relative comfort, and are provided with sports and leisure facilities during the day. There are no cells or other ‘prison-like’ facilities at the centre. The JJU is proud of the high success rate of the programme, and reports that more than 80 percent of children who went through the programme have not been known to return to antisocial behaviour or worse. A visit to the facility confirmed that children are not held in cells as the JJU said, and that there is some form of education, training programmes and sports facilities provided for children at the facility. It also confirmed that children at the facility are cared for by members of the Child Protection Unit of the Maldives Police Service. There is, however, a fundamental problem with the facility that is above and beyond the conditions in which the children are being held: none of the children who are at the facility have been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of one. The existence of the detention centre at Feydhoo Finolhu is not widely known to the general public. It also appears that among the few who are aware of it, most are under the impression that it is a remand facility for children awaiting sentencing for an offence they have been convicted of. The most recent Human Rights Report (2010) on the Maldives published by the State Department of the United States, for example, describes the facility thus: Juveniles awaiting sentencing are held in a juvenile correctional facility on Feydhoofinolhu Island run by police under the Ministry of Home Affairs’ jurisdiction.43 This, however, is not the case. As confirmed by officers in charge of the facility, the children who have been detained at Feydhoo Finolhu have not been charged with an offence – they are being held at the centre because they have been identified by the police as dangerous to the wider society and to themselves; and because they are deemed to possess the potential for committing serious offences. 43 State Department, “2010 Human Rights Report: Maldives”, Bureau of democracy, Human Rights, and Labour, April 8, 2011, accessed on November 19, 2011, http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2010/sca/154483.htm 57