Over the past year, cuts to the budgets of UN peace operations have largely impacted the organization’s actions on child protection. These measures continue to diminish the UN’s ability to monitor, report, and respond to grave violations, and thus weaken implementation of the Security Council’s children and armed conflict agenda.
In response, more than 20 non-governmental organizations, including ChildFund Alliance, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, Save the Children, Terre des Hommes and the International Bureau for Children’s Rights, signed an open letter to United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.
This open letter stresses the importance of allocating staff and budgetary resources needed to carry out specialized child protection functions in key UN peace missions.
The organizations call for the dissemination of a complete and accurate list of perpetrators of grave violations against children in the next annual report without distinction. The list currently published separates these perpetrators of grave violations into two groups : those who have put in place child protection measures and those who have not. The co-signatories also request that the parties in conflict on this list be removed from it only after verification that their commitment to protect children’s rights has been fulfilled.