S/PV.5936
5936th meeting
Thursday, 17 July 2008, 10 a.m.
New York
Children and armed conflict
Mr. Mubarak (Libyan Arab Jamahiriya) (spoke in Arabic): I should like at the outset to thank you, Sir, for convening and personally presiding over this open debate on children and armed conflict. We would also like to thank Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon; his Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy; the Executive Director of UNICEF, Ms. Ann Veneman; and the Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, Mr. Edmond Mullet, for their excellent presentations.
Despite the efforts made over the past six months at the regional and international levels, with the leading role played by the United Nations, we have yet to see tangible progress regarding the situation of children in armed conflict. Children continue to be recruited and sometimes re-recruited as combatants, and boys and girls continue to fall victim to acts of violation, rape, murder, maiming and arbitrary detention committed by parties to conflict in various regions, despite the repeated appeals made to those parties by the Security Council and the General Assembly to abide by the rules established under international law and the Geneva Conventions.
We are concerned by the persistent phenomenon of the recruitment and re-recruitment of child soldiers in situations of armed conflict. Despite the statements made by many parties to conflict reaffirming their commitment to establishing monitoring and reporting mechanisms, cooperation to that end has been insufficient. Therefore, we must urge all parties concerned to prevent child recruitment, to release all recruited children and to ensure their reintegration through appropriate development programmes. We call on the international financial institutions and donors to fund such programmes in countries affected by or emerging from conflict so that they can reintegrate those children by providing them with regular incomes, thus preventing their re-recruitment.
As a party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its Optional Protocol, my country deplores the fact that, in some countries affected by armed conflict, all too many children are subjected to rape or sexual harassment by parties to the conflicts and even by personnel of peacekeeping operations. In that connection, my country supports the zero-tolerance policy of the United Nations regarding acts of sexual violence. Once they have been found guilty of such heinous acts, the perpetrators must be punished. My delegation urges all countries to enforce their national laws criminalizing such practices and to combat and put an end to impunity.
Libya wishes to express its deep concern about the children suffering in the occupied Palestinian territories. In recent years, Israeli military operations have claimed the lives of more than 800 Palestinian children. Thousands have been displaced by the destruction of their families’ homes. Palestinian children have also been affected by the racist separation wall built in the occupied territory, which has prevented thousands of them from attending school. As for Gaza, which is in a state of siege, its suffering is indescribable.
We must also recall the suffering of children in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a number of press statements, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict has described the tragic situation that continues to face the children in those countries, including the fact that many have been killed or maimed as a result of car bombs, explosive belts, improvised explosive devices or bombings of schools and hospitals in occupied areas. In addition, many children are subject to arbitrary detention and deprived of their most fundamental rights, including the right to education and freedom of movement. Such acts are illegal, and we call on the coalition forces to rectify them and to release those children unconditionally.
In conclusion, we wish to thank the Working Group on Children and Armed Conflict for all its efforts to address issues related to children in situations of armed conflict. We hope that the Working Group will refrain from taking a selective approach and from politicization in formulating its recommendations. We would like to take this opportunity to draw the Council’s attention to the remarkable role played by UNICEF in protecting children, not only in conflict areas, but also in countries requiring food and development assistance.
Finally, Sir, we would like to thank your country once again. We shall support the draft presidential statement to be issued at the close of this meeting.
