6th March, 2018
The UN calls for urgent action on protection of 357 million children in crisis situations, saying they face a raft of challenges from family separation and forced recruitment to sexual exploitation and abject poverty.
UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ms Kate Gilmore, said: “In 2016 alone, 43 million children across 63 countries required humanitarian assistance.
“Today, 357 million children live in conflict zones – up by some 75 per cent since last century’s last decade and accounting for one in six children globally”.
Gilmore, at the annual meeting on the rights of the child tagged “Protecting the Rights of the Child in Humanitarian Situations”, urged immediate action to protect children from the consequences of “all too adult failings”.
“From floods, earthquakes and hurricanes to man-made political and economic instability, and armed conflicts between and among State and non-State parties globally.
“The costs of adult misconduct and the consequences of their misbehaviour as political, social and economic guardians have let down millions of children”.
She said countless unknown children had lost their lives in terrified transit on the Mediterranean sea, thousands had been violated, girls had been subjected to sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers,and others violated by numbers of religious and secular aid-workers.
“The tragedy of these all-too-adult failings are borne by children, but the shame is surely not children’s to bear,” she stated.
She pointed out that children were the vast majority of the populations most affected by conflict, most afflicted by abject poverty, most exposed to climate change.
“In flight, children face additional sexual abuse and exploitation, child labour and trafficking. In transit, they meet further abuse, neglect and deprivation of essential services.
“At reception, they more often meet unlawful detention, xenophobia and an absence of care for the physical and mental trauma to which they have been subjected,” she maintained.
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She emphasised: “No matter where they are, nor the status of their movement within or across borders – irregular as that may be – a child’s rights never abandons them.”
Questioning why, in 2018, the Secretary-General should need to confirm the UN’s zero-tolerance policy for sexual exploitation and abuse of children and adults, Gilmore stated: “The UN must own its shame.”
“International human rights law applies at all times, in all settings for all peoples of all ages,” she underscored.
She noted that in the seventh decade of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “we must strongly affirm that human rights hold and human rights persist, even in humanitarian settings and specifically for children.”
“We must bring children in – bring children to sit at the tables of decision making and participation and specifically so for the design, implementation and monitoring of our humanitarian assistance activities,” she urged.