CRINMAIL 171:
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Secretary General's Report and Security Council debate on Children and Armed Conflict
Report
The United Nations Secretary-General (SG) has issued the 2013 annual report on children and armed conflict to the Security Council, providing an overview of the situation of children in conflict zones, an update on measures taken for their protection and a set of recommendations on areas for future work.
The report includes Annex I and Annex II, which together make up the the so-called "list of shame", naming the parties that violate international standards on children and armed conflict. Updated every year, this list particularly highlights those countries or organisations considered persistent perpetrators, who have featured on the list for five or more years. The list has continued to grow, currently standing at 55 parties, with 28 persistent perpetrators. Nine new groups were added this year, including the Free Syrian Army and the M23 groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A small number of organisations were also removed, because they are no longer engaged in relevant violations. Read more.
Of particular importance this year are the strategies devised during a series of workshops and consultations on improving compliance by armed forces and armed groups with the protection of children's rights during conflicts. In the report, three core components of this work are set out - working to improve accountability for violence against children, ensuring the inclusion of children's issues in peace talks and peace agreements and the use of the child rights in armed conflict framework alongside UN due diligence procedures when providing United Nations support and assistance to national security forces.
Violence against children during armed conflict persists in many of the countries previously named as sites of concern, with the addition in 2013 of Mali. Two countries were moved off the list, however - Nepal and Sri Lanka - both of whom no longer contain any parties reported to be currently committing violence against children during conflict. The report also highlights the changing nature of armed conflict and the threats children face, noting in particular trends around use of schools for military purposes and the detention of children by security forces. It also highlighted effects on children of the widespread use of weaponized unmanned aerial vehicles (“drones”), including the lasting psychosocial damage that exposure to the risk of such attacks brings and its effect on realisation of rights, such as access to education, in targeted communities.
Debate
The report was discussed by the Security Council during its annual debate on Children and Armed Conflict on 17th June 2013. Unlike in previous years, however, the debate this year was not an open one, with only security council members and countries named in the report allowed to participate. NGOs and other states were not allowed to contribute to the debate. Read more.
The president of the Security Council released a statement after the debate. The statement expressed its appreciation for the work done in preparing the report and supported many of the recommendations and measures outlined within it. It also called for greater mainstreaming of children’s protection issues in peacekeeping and further action to challenge impunity by rights abusers. Read the full statement here. The Security Council has been criticised, however, for not raising the issue of non-state armed groups who, despite making up the majority of parties named on the “list of shame”, are excluded from the action plan process designed to help combatants move away from behaviours that violate children’s rights. For more on this, see the press release commenting on the debate by Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict here
News and Updates
Syria: War reaches “new levels of brutality”
In Syria, the civil war has reportedly reached "new levels of brutality" with evidence that children have been used as hostages, forced to watch scenes of torture and even made to take part in beheadings, according to the latest report by the UN Investigative Commission on Syria. In addition, 86 children used by rebel forces to take part in the conflict have been killed during combat. While acknowledging that abuses by the opposition have not reached the same “intensity and scale” of those perpetrated by the army and affiliated militias, the report recognises that they are becoming increasingly common and brutal. Evidence gathered also details mass executions, sexual violence, kidnappings and the probable use of chemical weapons, such as nerve gas. More on this story.
There is also evidence that both the government forces and opposition armed groups have used schools as military bases, barracks, detention centres and sniper posts, turning places of learning into military targets and putting students at risk. The Syrian government has interrogated students, carried out violent assaults on their protests and launched military attacks on schools, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
You can read a summary by CRIN of the ongoing conflict in Syria, with a particular focus on how it has affected children’s rights, here.
Arbitrary execution of children by extremists
In addition to being direct victims of the ongoing conflict, children in Syria are subjected to violence in other ways. In one recent case, as reported by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Islamist gunmen executed a 15-year-old boy in the northern city of Aleppo after he was accused of blasphemy. The boy, Mohammad Qataa, was abducted by gunmen allegedly belonging to an Al-Qaeda-affiliated group after they overheard him making what they regarded as a heretical comment against the Prophet Mohammed. The boy was then tortured, and later shot in the head and neck in a public square in front of a crowd and the boy’s parents. Read here for more.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the Taliban have allegedly beheaded two boys, aged 10 and 16, after accusing the pair of spying. The boys were abducted in the southern province of Kandahar as they scavenged for food in bins near police headquarters. A Taliban spokesman denied the group was behind the killings. BBC correspondents, however, say Taliban fighters have been known to behead victims, including a 12-year-old boy and a seven-year-old girl in 2012, but have always denied such attacks against children. Full story.
Attacks on children also continued elsewhere in Afghanistan. In one recent incident, a suicide bomber killed at least 10 children during an attack on a military patrol in eastern Afghanistan. Police said a local school had just let pupils out for lunch when the attack happened in a local market. While there is some uncertainty as to the age of the children involved, Reuters news agency quoted a witness who visited the hospital where the casualties had been admitted as saying most were under the age of 12. Full story here.
Progress slow to end use of child soldiers in Mali and Burma
Children as young as 13 in Mali, previously recruited as child soldiers by armed groups or suspected of links with them, are now being detained by government forces alongside adults, Amnesty International reports. In some cases the children detained also report having been tortured. The human rights group conducted a month-long visit to the country where they interviewed some of the children and found basic violations of international law, including French forces failing to ask the ages of detained children or interviewing them in their mother tongue before handing them over to the Malian gendarmerie in Bamako. One child claimed that during the plane transfer, he was blindfolded and had his hands and feet tied. For more, see here. The recently released United Nations Secretary-General’s 2012 Report on Children and Armed Conflict has, for the first time, explicitly named parties to the conflict in Mali as being responsible for the recruitment and use of children as soldiers and for sexual violence against children.
Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch has accused Burma of failing to make progress in ending its use of child soldiers nearly one year after signing an agreement with the United Nations to do so. The recent report argues that the Burmese military has failed to meet “even the basic indicators of progress” and notes that on at least four occasions, the Burmese military has reneged on its commitments by refusing the UN access to military facilities to assess the presence of child soldiers, a level of cooperation from the Burmese military described in the Secretary General’s report on Children and Armed Conflict as “insufficient”. Read full story.
Reports
Child Trafficking, Child Soldiers: The Relationship Between Two Worst Forms of Child Labour
The Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative has published a report which examines significant academic gaps with regard to the intersection of child trafficking and the use of child soldiers. Drawing on cases from Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan, the report argues that during conflict, the very act of providing child soldiers constitutes a crime of trafficking, noting that “in peacetime, traffickers produce child prostitutes, drug mules and slaves; but when conflict breaks out, those same traffickers may well produce child soldiers." Read more here.
THE LAST WORD
"In recent years, United Nations child protection actors have noted with concern that the evolving character and tactics of armed conflict are creating unprecedented threats to children. The absence of clear front lines and identifiable
opponents, the increasing use of terror tactics by some armed groups and certain methods used by security forces have made children more vulnerable."
Report by the Secretary General on Children and Armed Conflict 2013.
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