Letter to UN Secretary General on Annual Report on Children and Armed Conflict
Dear Mr. Secretary-General,
We are writing with regard to your forthcoming annual report on children and armed conflict. As you finalize your decisions regarding the annexes, we urge you to ensure the publication of a complete list of perpetrators of grave violations that is evidence-based and accurately reflects data collected and verified by the United Nations Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism (MRM).
As nongovernmental organizations working to alleviate suffering in humanitarian settings and protect human rights, we strongly support UN Security Council Resolution 1612 (2005) and subsequent resolutions on children and armed conflict, as concrete tools for improving the protection of children in war. The MRM, the annual report, and its annexed list of perpetrators are a crucial foundation for accountability and ending and preventing violations, by paving the way for the UN’s engagement with parties to conflict. However, these mechanisms will only remain as powerful as they are credible and consistently applied to all perpetrators.
We, therefore, reiterate our disappointment with the significant disparities between the evidence presented in last year’s annual report and the parties listed in its annexes for committing grave violations against children. In particular, we believe that the de-listings of the Saudi- and Emirati-led coalition and the Tatmadaw contravened the criteria that were set out in the 2010 annual report, which states that a party would be de-listed from the annexes “on condition that there is UN-verified information that it has ceased commission of all the said grave violations against children for which the party is listed […] for a period of at least one reporting cycle” (A/64/742-S/2010/181, para. 178). Neither the Saudi- and Emirati-led coalition nor the Tatmadaw have met these criteria.