The United Nations Security Council has established a monitoring and reporting mechanism that will ensure the protection of children exposed to armed conflict, a UN statement said on Wednesday.
The mechanism will monitor grave violations by both governments and insurgents and will focus on the killing or maiming of children, the recruitment or use of child soldiers, attacks against schools or hospitals, rape or other sexual violence against children, the abduction of children and the denial of humanitarian access for children.
In the past decade, two million children have been killed in situations of armed conflict, while six million children have been disabled or injured. More than a quarter of a million child soldiers are being abused and exploited today in situations of armed conflict around the globe.
Since 2003, more than 11-million children have been displaced within their own countries, and 2,4-million children have been forced to flee conflict and take refuge outside their home countries.
Abductions are becoming more widespread, as witnessed, for example, in Darfur, northern Uganda, Nepal and Burundi. Thousands of children, particularly girls, are subjected to rape and other sexual abuses in situations of conflict. Landmines kill or maim 8 000 to 10 000 children every year.
The Security Council has also ordered offending parties, which have already been listed in an ongoing naming process of all offending parties, to prepare and implement right away concrete action plans and timelines for ending violations against children.
Part of the new UN resolution is a new working group to oversee implementation of these measures and monitor progress in ending ongoing violations against children.
”We have now entered the ‘era of application’,” commented UN special representative for children and armed conflict Olara A Otunnu.
”For the first time, the UN is establishing a formal, structured and detailed compliance regime of this kind. This brings together all the key elements we have been developing, in the last few years, to ensure accountability and compliance on the ground. This is a turning point of great consequence.”
Under the new mechanism, UN-led task forces will be established in phases, ultimately covering all conflict situations of concern, to monitor the conduct of all parties and report regularly to a central task force based at UN headquarters in New York. These reports will serve as triggers for action against the offending parties.
The Security Council has directed UN peacekeeping missions and UN country teams to enter into immediate dialogue with offending parties listed in the secretary general’s latest report. In this way, the time needed to prepare and implement concrete, time-bound action plans for ending the violations for which they have been cited will be shorter.
The latest report lists 54 offending parties, governments as well as insurgents, drawn from 11 situations of conflict. These include:
- the Tamil Tigers from Sri Lanka;
- Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia from Colombia;
- the Janjaweed from Sudan;
- the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist from Nepal;
- the Lord’s Resistance Army from Uganda;
- the Karen National Liberation Army from Myanmar;
and
- government forces from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar and Uganda.