Submitted by crinadmin on
The present report has been prepared pursuant to Security Council resolution 1612 (2005) and covers the period from December 2008 to June 2009. The Ugandan People's Defence Forces (UPDF) and its auxiliary forces, the local defence units, have been removed from the annexes to the eighth report of the Secretary-General on children and armed conflict (A/63/785-S/2009/158). That delisting follows the signing in January 2009 of an action plan in line with Security Council resolutions 1539 (2004) and 1612 (2005) between the Government of Uganda and the United Nations country-level task force on monitoring and reporting. The present report outlines the implementation of that action plan and the follow-up activities to the conclusions and recommendations of the Security Council Working Group on Children and Armed Conflict with regard to Uganda (S/AC.51/2008/13). The report highlights that the cooperation with the Government of Uganda has been very effective and has allowed the United Nations and its partners to successfully verify that no more children are present in the ranks of UPDF or its auxiliary forces and that no cases of recruitment or use of children have been reported since August 2007. The report also shows that the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) remains very active in the region, despite the fact that no military activity has been reported on Ugandan territory since the signing of the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement in August 2006. Violent incidents of killing and maiming of children, abductions, recruitment and grave sexual violence are regularly reported in neighbouring countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic and in southern Sudan. The report emphasizes the regional dimension of LRA activities and how United Nations actors and country-level task forces on monitoring and reporting are increasingly working on regional coordination for information-sharing, data collection and the repatriation of abducted children to their countries of origin. The report ends with a series of recommendations that aim to address the remaining challenges in Uganda and the region for enhancing the protection of children. Further information
pdf: http://www.crin.org/docs/SC_Uganda_10_09full_report.pdf