22 December 2008 - CRIN Children and Armed Conflict 126
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**NEWS IN BRIEF**
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MSF: Top Ten Humanitarian Crises of 2008 [publication]
[22 December 2008] - Massive forced civilian displacements, violence, and unmet medical needs in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Iraq, Sudan, and Pakistan, along with neglected medical emergencies in Myanmar and Zimbabwe, are some of the worst humanitarian and medical emergencies in the world, the international medical humanitarian organisation Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reports in its annual list of the “Top Ten” humanitarian crises.
The report underscores major difficulties in bringing assistance to people affected by conflict. The lack of global attention to the growing prevalence of HIV-tuberculosis co-infection and the critical need for increased global efforts to prevent and treat childhood malnutrition—the underlying cause of death for up to five million children per year—are also included in the list.
Further information
For more information, contact:
Médecins sans Frontières
Rue de Lausanne 78, CP 116 - 1211- Geneva 21, Switzerland
Tel: + 41 (22) 849 84 84; Fax: + 41 (22) 849 84 88
Website: http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org
Visit: http://www.crin.org/resources/infoDetail.asp?ID=19270
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STATELESSNESS: Futures Denied - Statelessness among infants, children, and youth [publication]
Statelessness, or the lack of effective nationality, impacts the daily lives of some 11-12 million people around the world. Perhaps those who suffer most are stateless infants, children and youth. Though born and raised in their parents’ country of habitual residence, they lack formal recognition of their existence. A few key steps taken by individual countries and UN agencies can help reduce statelessness among infants and children and prevent millions of youth from growing up isolated from society. The goal of this report, which is dedicated to the promise and potential of all children, is increased recognition of every child’s right to a nationality and the actions that can be taken to give them a brighter future.
A number of legal instruments have been created to regulate the status and treatment of stateless persons. The primary international covenants are the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which define statelessness and create rules for attribution of nationality where statelessness would otherwise occur. However, only 63 states are party to the 1954 Convention, and only 35 to the 1961 Convention.
Children may become stateless as a result of political change or when states deliberately write laws excluding minority groups from citizenship, such as in the Dominican Republic, Burma, Estonia and Latvia. When state systems linked to registration are destroyed during conflict or disasters, people may lose access to their birth records and citizenship documents. Families who leave homes and possessions during political crises may flee without identification or lose proof of citizenship. It can also be difficult for children to acquire their parents’ nationality when refugee mothers give birth outside their home countries. In addition, countries that determine citizenship exclusively by the father’s nationality create problems for children born out of wedlock, separated from their fathers, or whose fathers are stateless.
Statelessness has innumerable consequences on children and there are few agencies addressing their plight. Unlike refugees, stateless children receive neither international recognition nor aid, and they don’t have the option of returning to a country of origin like migrants do. The situation can lead to poor home environments and family separation. For example, in Bangladesh some 160,000 stateless Bihari live in severely overcrowded settlements with sometimes a dozen or more family members living in a single small room. In Malaysia, children in Sabah whose migrant parents have been arrested and detained or deported end up living and working on the street.
Birth registration establishes a child’s legal identity and the state’s responsibility for that child. But without a permanent identity, children will have limited access to health care and to primary education; and are almost universally restricted from receiving public secondary education. In Kuwait, stateless people are denied the right to officially register a birth, marriage, or death. One father said he was able to obtain a birth certificate for his first-born child in 1997. However, when he produced the birth announcement for his second child some ten years later, the Ministry of Health refused to issue a birth certificate. Without one, this man’s younger child will be able to attend school only as long as he can afford to pay private school tuition. In other cases, families may be told their children can attend school only if space is available after citizens’ children have registered.
Unable to prove their true age, stateless children may be susceptible to exploitation or to punishment as adults. Statelessness may lead to forced or early marriage, harassment, sexual and physical violence, and trafficking. One stateless girl from northern Thailand responded to a job offer in a Bangkok restaurant and ended up trafficked to Malaysia for commercial sexual exploitation in a brothel. She and others were eventually rescued, but then she languished for months in a detention centre while states argued where she belonged. Traffickers of stateless children also cannot be taken to court when children are without proper documents that prove their age or resident status.
Stateless children are also frequently unable to obtain passports, to travel freely, or acquire jobs in the formal sector as they get older. Some resort to the use of smugglers to remove themselves from difficult situations or in hopes of supporting themselves and their families. One interviewee in Syria knew a family with five children who were smuggled to Egypt and left stranded there for six months until they agreed to pay the smugglers SYP 1 million (US $20,000) to go to Europe.
The primary responsibility for ending statelessness rests on governments and Refugees International urges all states to respect the fundamental human right of all children to have a nationality. In recent years, the governments of Bangladesh, Mauritania, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the United Arab Emirates have or are taking steps to provide citizenship to formerly stateless people. In addition, other nations are proactive in preventing statelessness. The Swedish Citizens Act passed in 2000, for example, allows a stateless child born in Sweden to become a citizen if the child is under age five and permanently resides in Sweden.
Some key actions that can be taken now are ensuring that every child is registered at birth, and identifying cases of disputed nationality and grant citizenship when a child would otherwise be stateless. (See page 21 for a full list of recommendations.) The United Nations can support such efforts by strengthening UNH CR to fulfill its mandate on statelessness, organising a comprehensive survey to identify stateless populations, including children, and reinforcing UN ICEF efforts surrounding birth registration and childhood education. As a world leader and international donor, the U.S. should make the prevention and reduction of statelessness among children part of the U.S. human rights agenda and provide financial and diplomatic support to UNH CR and UN ICEF for their efforts to prevent and reduce statelessness.
For more information, contact:
Refugees International
2001 S Street NW, Suite 700, Washington, DC 20009, USA
Tel: +1 202 828 0110; Fax: +1 202 828 0819
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.refugeesinternational.org
Visit: http://www.crin.org/resources/infodetail.asp?id=19272
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DISPLACEMENT: State of Neglect - displaced children in the Central African Republic [publication]
In July and August 2008, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) conducted a fact-finding mission to the Central African Republic (CAR) to research and report on the protection and assistance needs of displaced children.
Internally displaced children in CAR face severe protection problems from ongoing insecurity and violence. They have suffered trauma after witnessing extreme levels of violence such as the killing of family members when their villages were attacked by road bandits known as Zaraguina or coupeurs de route. During these attacks, some displaced children, including girls, have been abducted to work as porters of stolen property or kidnapped for ransom. Many others have been recruited into armed forces or groups, and processes for their release are delayed due to a stalled peace process and because proper protection and rehabilitation programmes have yet to be funded and launched.
The nutrition, water and sanitation, health, and shelter needs of CAR’s displaced children remain largely unmet. Many are in urgent need of adequate shelter, having been forced to sleep outdoors during the rainy season, exposed to higher risks of contracting malaria or respiratory infections. Displaced children face economic exploitation as they are forced to work in fields belonging to host communities in exchange for food or meagre pay. Finally, displaced children from minority groups such as the Peuhl face ethnic discrimination, not least because many host communities have the mistaken perception that all Peuhl are road bandits.
The government of CAR and the international community have not adequately addressed these protection concerns, for various reasons. The government lacks a specific policy and legal framework to protect IDPs in general, and internally displaced children in particular; and state security and social services are almost totally absent in the north of the country. International humanitarian organisations have not focused specifically on displaced children’s needs, and so have been unable to meet them in timely and efficient ways; and a wider presence of child-mandated organisations working on the ground is urgently needed in areas of displacement. It will take a concerted effort on the part of both the government and the international community in CAR to redress this state of neglect.
A window of opportunity has opened for CAR in the form of increased development funding for 2009, including $600 million pledged at a landmark donor meeting in Brussels in October 2007, to be disbursed over the next three years. Humanitarian funding for CAR increased tremendously in 2008, and by the end of the year the Consolidated Appeals Process (CAP) may prove to be one of the best-funded in the world (it was 91 per cent funded at the time of publication of this report). Development and humanitarian funds must be used to give displaced children in CAR an opportunity to rebuild their lives after the devastating effects of violence and neglect.
Further information
For more information, contact:
Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre
Chemin de Balexert, 7-9, 1219 Chatelaine, Geneva, Switzerland
Tel: +41 (22) 799 07 00; Fax: +41 (22) 799 07 01
Visit: http://www.crin.org/resources/infoDetail.asp?ID=19242
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PARAGUAY: State accepts responsibility for child soldier's death [news]
The State of Paraguay has issued a public apology for the murder of child soldier Gerardo Vargas Areco in 1989. The Minister of Defence, General Luis Bareiro Spaini, army, navy and airforce officers, were among officials who attended the ceremony on the border with Brazil – 570km from Asunción in the community of Bella Vista Norte, where his family lives – to recognise their responsibility and to ask forgiveness of the child’s family, as ordered by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in September 2006.
Gerardo Vargas Areco was 15 when he was illegally recruited into military service in the armed forces of Paraguay. He was short in the back by his superior. His body also showed signs of torture.
As a result of this and other cases affecting child soldiers in Paraguay, the State has been forced to modify its domestic legislation and to deposit a declaration to the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, prohibiting the recruitment of children under 18 in the armed forces.
The State has fulfilled some of the Court’s orders contained in the judgment but must still carry out “all necessary actions to identify, judge and sanction all those responsible for violations committed in the present case”.
The international complaint against the Paraguayan State before the Inter-American Commission and the Court of Human Rights was filed by the Centre for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) and the Servicio de Paz y Justicia (SERPAJ) of Paraguay.
[Source: CEJIL]
Further information
Visit: http://www.crin.org/resources/infoDetail.asp?ID=19273&flag=news
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PHILIPPINES: Muslim rebels agree to end use of child soldiers [news]
[MANILA, 12 December 2008] - Muslim separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) rebels have agreed to end the recruitment and use of child soldiers, the UN special representative for children and armed conflict, Radhika Coomaraswamy, has announced.
"When we met with the leadership of the MILF, they agreed that they had children in their midst and they agreed to enter into an action plan with a UN country team to ensure the separation of the children from their ranks and their return to civilian life," she said.
"The negotiations will begin for an action plan. The action plan has to be time-bound, concrete, and has to have a process of verification," she said, speaking to reporters in Manila on 12 December.
If the MILF follows through on this commitment, it could given them a sense of legitimacy and boost the chances of a negotiated peace, she said.
The 12,000-strong MILF has been fighting for an independent Islamic state on Mindanao, in the mineral-rich southern third of this predominantly Roman Catholic country of 91 million people. Tens of thousands have been displaced, in what the government and international aid agencies have described as a complex emergency situation that could lead to a full-blown humanitarian crisis if left unchecked.
Along with the Al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf group and the communist New People's Army, the MILF has been included in a UN list of groups using child combatants.
Denial
In the past, the MILF denied using child soldiers, but acknowledged they had been taking care of boys under eight who were orphaned in some of its camps in the south. It argued it was protecting these boys from hostile fire and giving them an education.
But military intelligence sources and child rights groups say many of them are used on the battlefield or in support roles as porters, guides or camp hands.
The London-based Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers - in a report earlier this year - said that up to 13 percent of the MILF's 12,000 strong force in 2005 were children.
Documents also declassified by the army intelligence, and obtained earlier by IRIN, showed that the MILF continued to train children as "tough, self-reliant, fighting men".
“Action plan” to begin in January
Coomaraswamy said the UN and the MILF "hope to begin the action plan in January" which includes the MILF allowing a UN team to inspect their camps to carry out an assessment of the number of child soldiers.
She said she would be urging the MILF to "accelerate the process" so that a report can be submitted to the UN Secretary-General at the end of February. "The end of February is a time-line at least for the first phase [of the action plan],” she said.
Asked why the UN was optimistic that the MILF would live up to its commitment, she replied: "You'd be surprised that in some of our dealings with rebel groups in Africa, they see themselves not as rebel groups but as leaders of whole provinces, nations. They want that legitimacy. They don't want to be on some terrorist list, that's for sure."
Further information
[Source: IRIN]
Visit: http://www.crin.org/resources/infoDetail.asp?ID=19198&flag=news
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**NEWS IN BRIEF**
Sri Lanka: Forced child conscription stepped up (AFP, 18 December 2008)
http://www.crin.org/resources/infoDetail.asp?ID=19255&flag=news
DR Congo: Protect Children From Rape and Recruitment (HRW, 17 December 2008)
http://www.crin.org/resources/infoDetail.asp?ID=19251&flag=news
OPT: A call for urgent international protection of Palestinian citizens (Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, 10 December 2008)
Nepal: Minors to be discharged from Maoist cantonments (Office of the Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, 8 December 2008)
http://www.crin.org/resources/infoDetail.asp?ID=19216&flag=news
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