The Rationale and Importance of Monitoring and Reporting on Children's Rights During Armed

The rationale and importance of monitoring and reporting on children's rights during armed conflict

Paper submitted by Dr. Christian Salazar Volkmann, Deputy Director Programme Division, UNICEF

Vienna+20: Advancing the Protection of Human Rights Achievements, Challenges and Perspectives 20 Years after the World Conference International Expert Conference on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the World Conference on Human Rights

organized by the Austrian Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs in cooperation with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights (BIM), the European Training and Research Centre for Democracy and Human Rights of the University of Graz (UNI-ETC); Vienna Hofburg, Austria, 27-28 June 2013

New York, June 2013

This paper focusses on advances and challenges in monitoring child rights during armed conflict, with a particular focus on the UN mechanism to monitor gross violations of children’s rights in armed conflict called “MRM”.

The MRM is the latest instrument of the international community to protect children in armed conflict through a public report by the Secretary General to the Security Council. It is part of a historic line to protect civilians during armed conflict that was established by the negotiations of the first Geneva Conventions but represents a historic novel: it reflects the concerns of UN member States about child rights violations as part of the humanitarian agenda and it draws attention to children’s rights during armed conflict at the highest levels of the UN.

This comes at a time where the international justice system is starting to act against perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Just recently, the International Criminal Court issued its first conviction of a war criminal. In July 2012, Thomas Lubanga was found guilty of recruiting and using children as soldiers during the armed conflict in DRC. He was sentenced to 14 years in jail.

Dilemmas around humanitarian action and human rights

These developments raise the bar for monitoring and reporting on children’s rights. They also lead to challenging dilemmas around humanitarian delivery and advocacy for the protection of children in armed conflict. Is it better to protect children through the delivery of emergency supplies or is advocacy on gross violations of children’s rights the strategy to stop and prevent violations? What is the most effective and workable combination of both approaches? And how do humanitarian organizations deal with the risks?

There are no easy answers to these questions. There is no magic formula to determine what is in the best interest of children in situations which are live-threatening and where macro-crimes are committed. The best possible combination of humanitarian delivery and advocacy for the respect of children’s rights in extreme situations must be found case by case.

Over time, UNICEF has learned a lot about finding the right balance and managing associated risks. This organizational experience is important to fulfill UNICEF’s mandate established by the General Assembly in 1946 to deliver emergency aid to children as well as our obligations under Security Council Resolution 1612, which created the MRM in 2005.

The MRM

The MRM is the way through which the Secretary General collects UN-verified information about child rights violations in armed conflict for his annual report to the Security Council. The SG report contains two annexes which list countries who are under the special watch of the Security Council because some or all of the following six gross violations of child rights are taking place:

-  killing,

-  maiming,

-  rape and other forms of grave sexual violence,

-  recruitment and use of children,

-  attacks against schools and hospitals, and

-  denial of humanitarian access.

Annex I of the report refers to countries which are anyway on the agenda of the Security Council because of a variety of concerns related to peace and security. Annex II lists countries which are only reviewed because of the child rights situation on the ground. The Special Representative of the SG on Children in Armed Conflict has also added to the SGs report “other situations of concern”. The listing of a party to a conflict in Annex 1 triggers the activation of the MRM in the country where this party is committing the violations. Once activated, the MRM monitors violations committed by all parties in the country, whether they are listed or not. In total, there are currently 12 MRMs active across the world: Afghanistan, CAR, Chad, Colombia, DRC, Iraq, Myanmar, Philippines, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan and Yemen.

So far, the impact of the SGs report has been mainly political. It has triggered a number of SC resolutions on children in armed conflict. The Security Council has also expressed its readiness to impose targeted and graduated sanctions against parties to conflict that commit grave violations against children. It has imposed such sanctions against two individual perpetrators in Ivory Coast and against 14 individual perpetrators in DRC.

Activation of the MRM

The formal procedure to activate the MRM has varied since its establishment. The practice in recent years was that the Special Representative of the Secretary General on Children in Armed Conflict writes to the SRSG in a country that was listed or to the RC and possibly also to the UNICEF Representative. In this letter, the SRSG requests the activation of the MRM and the establishment of a Country Task Force on Monitoring and Reporting (CTFMR). The Country Task Force typically is composed by the main child protection actors – UN and non-UN, national and international. However, in very sensitive settings the TF has been kept smaller. The government is not part of the TF for neutrality reasons. Exceptions are made in case of independent State bodies, such as Ombudsperson offices and National Human Rights Commissions. This was done, for example, in Colombia and in the Philippines.

Although the establishment of a country task force is an important requirement for the MRM it can take time for it to become operational. For example, in 2011, the SRSG CAAC wrote to the RC in Yemen requesting the implementation of the MRM three days after the Security Council Open Debate on CAAC but it took a year until the TF was formally established.

Reporting requirements

Once the MRM is activated, there will be three main reporting requirements:

1.  Every two months, the MRM TF will provide situation updates to the Office to the SRSG CAAC and to UNICEF HQ through a document called “Global Horizontal Note”.

2.  Once per year, the TF also has to provide inputs to the country-specific paragraphs in the global annual report of the SG.

3.  Eventually, the MRM TF will be asked to contribute to a country specific report, if the SG and the SC call for it, which may happen only once every couple of years.

Methods of monitoring

The MRM depends largely on primary information collected from witnesses and survivors of an incident. In general, this requires interviewing affected children or their families in the conflict zone or when they come out of the zone as internally displaced persons or refugees. Depending on the country situation, these interviews can be conducted by UNICEF staff, by staff from other UN organizations or through NGO partners. The MRM Country Task Force can report information that has been UN verified as well as information that is deemed “credible and unverified.” In any case, the MRM task force needs to agree on transparent and reliable methods to analyze available primary and secondary information to establish patterns of abuse.

Challenges

Monitoring gross violations of child rights in armed conflict requires managing sensitivities and pressures by Governments. Furthermore, NGOs usually push UNICEF to do more monitoring and speak-out more forcefully in cases of grave violations of children’s rights. The MRM requires special measures to safeguard data from destruction or theft. The MRM also adds challenges to staff safety, particularly as the information generated through the MRM is used by the Security Council for formal statements, possible sanctions and could become relevant in future trials against perpetrators by international Courts. There are also technical challenges posed by the MRM. UNICEF does not have sufficient staff skilled and trained in human rights monitoring, legal classification of cases and data base systems to store them.

Opportunities

While acknowledging some of the challenges of the MRM, I would also like to highlight how the MRM has a direct, positive impact on the lives of children affected by armed conflict. A very practical benefit of the MRM is that it allows the collection of data and trend analysis of grave violations. Therefore it provides an extremely valuable evidence base for UNICEF programming to protect children and support their rehabilitation. Initial findings from UNICEFs global evaluation on child protection in emergencies indicate that the MRM is currently the best available system for evidence building and data generation around gross violations of child rights.

In Chad, for example, the education cluster, together with the child protection sub-cluster, is systematically monitoring and reporting on military occupation of schools, enabling UNICEF to advocate publicly for the protection of children’s rights to education.

In Afghanistan, in an extremely volatile security environment with political sensitivities, MRM monitoring of the killing and maiming of children by mines and UXOs has revealed that a high percentage of the casualties were boys, 9-14 years of age, who were out of school and working in hazardous labor, collecting scrap metal to help support their families.

As a result, a mine risk education project was developed to assist this particular group of children, again demonstrating how MRM monitoring can make a positive difference in the lives of children affected by armed conflict.

The MRM also leads to action plans which propose a comprehensive support for children that suffered gross violation of their rights. For example, since 2005 when the MRM was established, 20 MRM Action Plans have been negotiated and signed with parties to conflict in 13 different countries. These Action Plans – implemented in close coordination with UNICEF country programmes – have led to the release and reintegration of thousands of children from armed forces and groups. The most recent MRM Action Plan, signed with the DRC Government, includes provisions both for the release of children from the Congolese army and for assistance to child survivors of sexual violence.

Furthermore, the MRM supports community-based protection systems. In Nepal and Colombia, for example, MRM monitoring is operated by community networks such as village committees. Strengthening these types of community-based structures in monitoring violations against children is a very effective way to mobilized communities to protect children and to prevent violations from reoccurring.

UNICEF’s approach

In all discussions around the MRM, it is important to remember that UNICEF delivered on its mandate by combining emergency service delivery with public advocacy and quiet diplomacy since its foundation.

Supporting and protecting children from the impact of war are the historic roots of UNICEF’s existence. The UN General Assembly created UNICEF in 1946 as International Children’s Emergency Fund “for the benefit of children and adolescents of countries which were victims of aggression”. Impressive examples for the strategy to combine service delivery and diplomacy in emergencies include UNICEF’s negotiations of days of peace. This was first done in 1985 in El Salvador. For three days, the fighting stopped, and 250,000 children were immunized. In 1987 a similar humanitarian ceasefire was achieved in Lebanon. In 1989 corridors of peace allowed to deliver food and medical supplies to the millions of people in the midst of a disastrous famine in war-torn Sudan. UNICEF made equally impressive efforts in public advocacy. For example, in 1989 it drew international attention to the suffering of children under apartheid and warfare in southern Africa through a public report called “Children on the Front Line: The Impact of Apartheid, Destabilization and Warfare on Children in Southern and South Africa.”

These negotiations and advocacy initiatives had one common thrust: they were built on humanitarian arguments and aimed at humanitarian access to children.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child (and later its optional protocol on the involvement of children in armed conflict) expanded the framework of reference towards human rights. This important expansion of UNICEF’s normative framework happened at a time where massive human rights violations were committed in the bloody conflicts that spread across many regions after the end of the Cold War. In a number of cases, armed actors targeted children directly when committing gross violations of human rights such as during the genocide in Ruanda or during the war crimes in former Yugoslavia. In 1995, UNICEF picked-up these extremely worrisome developments and formulated an Anti-War Agenda, stating: “The plight of children in war-time contradicts not just every normal human concern for their welfare but also the professed beliefs and legal obligations of those responsible… We believe that insisting on the rights of children is one of the best ways of reasserting core humanitarian values.”

Graca Machel’s landmark study on children in war in 1996 argued in the same direction. The study provided a comprehensive global insight into the scale and scope of suffering of children during armed conflict and recommended the appointment of an independent expert on violence against children during armed conflict. As a result, the Secretary General appointed his first Special Representative on Children in Armed Conflict.

The new normative framework also led to an expansion of UNICEF’s role in the aftermath of conflicts. In the second half of the 1990ies UNICEF began to provide technical assistance about gross violations of children’s rights to Truth Commission in Guatemala, Sierra Leone, Liberia and South Africa. In 1999, UNICEF also allowed a staff member to declare about child rights violations before an International Court. This was in relation to the assassination of five street children by Guatemalan security forces in a trial before the Interamerican Court for Human Rights.

The CRC also changed the international expectations towards UNICEF in such situations. As the CRC guides UNICEF’s mission and mandate, there is expectation that UNICEF speaks-out when children’s rights are severely violated. As mentioned above, these developments made the work in humanitarian response more complicated. Tensions around humanitarian delivery and the defense of children’s rights in situation of conflict increased. This became visible when Executive Director Carol Bellamy decided in autumn of 1995 to stop UNICEF’s education programs in Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan because the Taliban prohibited girls from entering schools.