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.
2.
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”.
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.
In 1999, the Security Council picked-up the changing views on the suffering of children during war and adopted its
first resolution on children armed conflict. In this resolution, the Council strongly condemned violations of
children’s rights in armed conflict and called on all parties to end them. The Council referred to obligations under
international humanitarian law, under the Convention on the Rights of the Child and to the Rome Statute of the
International Criminal Court “in which conscripting or enlisting children under the age of fifteen into national armed
forces or using them to participate actively in hostilities is characterized as a war crime”.
Finally
Coming back to the dilemma raised at the beginning of this paper: Is it better to protect children through the delivery
of emergency aid or is public advocacy on gross violations of children’s rights a more effective means to stop and
prevent violations? Today, we cannot answer such question in an “either-or” way. An argument such as the one
raised a few years ago by the representative of another UN agency in the Middle East opposing a statement of the
RC in defense of women’s rights saying “I will not jeopardize the fate of a hundred thousand refugees by speakingout because a few women are put in prison” ignores that the UN is expected to deliver on both accountabilities - and
must find the right balance between them over and over again. Responding to these accountabilities is not just
difficult for UNICEF but is a challenge across the UN system.
In 2010, the Secretary General launched a study to analyze how the UN acted in the final months of the armed
conflict in Sri Lanka when large numbers of civilians, including many boys and girls, were killed during the final
offensive of the Sri Lankan Armed Forces. This study was completed recently. Its recommendations call on the UN
to clarify its understanding and accountabilities in the field of protection and human rights in humanitarian contexts
and live saving scenarios. The Sri Lanka report proposes burden sharing and accountability for upholding UN values
and norms amongst the different UN organizations in such situations. This is important because in the end, the
mandate of the UN to ensure peace, security and human rights is a responsibility of all UN institutions who act in
situations of armed conflict.