El Salvador has published legislation permitting life imprisonment for minors as young as 12 convicted of serious offences including homicide, rape, terrorism, and gang membership, with the law set to take effect on 26 April. The measure, signed by President Nayib Bukele and passed as a constitutional amendment, forms part of a broader crackdown on gang violence that has kept the country under a rolling state of emergency since March 2022 — during which more than 90,000 people have been imprisoned, giving El Salvador one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. UNICEF and other human rights bodies have condemned the reform, warning that life sentences for children contradict international standards under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which requires that juvenile offenders be treated with rehabilitation as the primary goal; a recent independent expert report further alleged that the four-year emergency has involved crimes against humanity committed on a systematic scale.