Schoolgirls imprisoned for scribbling on a photo of Nkurunziza

Three Burundian teenagers in Burundi have been sent to jail pending trial for scribbling a photo of President Pierre Nkurunziza in textbooks, activists said.

The girls, aged 15, 16 and 17, risk up to five years in prison for insulting the head of state if they are found guilty.

The judges said the three girls should be "prosecuted for insulting the head of state" and ordered them to go to a juvenile section in a northern Burundi prison in Ngozi, pending To be judged, said the FENADEB, civil society coordination group consisting of 48 organizations. .

The trio has been in custody since March 12, when they were arrested with three other schoolgirls and a 13-year-old boy. The boy was released immediately because he had not yet reached the age of criminal responsibility and the three girls were released without charge.

The girls are accused of altering Nkurunziza's photographs in five textbooks belonging to their school, but teachers stressed that textbooks were shared by all students because there was not enough for them to everyone can own one.

A judicial source, who described the case as "very sensitive" and said that the case had been directly supervised by the Attorney General, said the girls had arrived at the prison on Wednesday afternoon.

According to Lewis Mudge, of Human Rights Watch, the father of one of the girls did not already know when they could be tried, but they were already "too afraid to eat".

In 2016, several schoolchildren were sentenced to prison terms for similar scribbles on the president's face, and hundreds of students were deported, causing an international outcry.

Burundi has been in turmoil since Nkurunziza, in April 2015, ran for a fiercely disputed third term.

The violence claimed the lives of at least 1,200 people and displaced more than 400,000 people between April 2015 and May 2017, according to estimates by the International Criminal Court (ICC), which opened an investigation.

"With so many real crimes committed in Burundi, it is tragic that children are being sued for scribbles without gravity," said Mudge of HRW.

"Authorities should focus on ensuring that perpetrators of serious human rights violations are held to account rather than imprisoning schoolchildren for doodles."