Category: Human Rights

High Commissioner Volker Türk said, from the capital Ouagadougou, that his local office had been “engaging intensely with the authorities, civil society actors, human rights defenders, UN partners and others on many of the multifaceted human rights challenges” the country faces following a coup in January 2022 that saw Captain Ibrahim Traoré assume power.

Solidarity visit

“I came here to express my solidarity with the people of Burkina Faso at this difficult time and to engage on the human rights situation at the highest level,” said Mr. Türk.

OHCHR

The UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk addresses the media at the end of his visit to Burkina Faso.

He expressed gratitude to Captain Traoré, in his role as President of the transition, adding that they had held in-depth and wide-ranging discussions “on the grave security situation”, the humanitarian crisis as well as climate change and environmental degradation.

They also discussed shrinking civic space, “inequalities, the need to forge a new social contract and on ensuring inclusive participation of all Burkinabe in the transition process” back to civilian rule.

Describing the suffering of Burkinabe as “heartbreaking”, the head of OHCHR said there are 2.3 million people who are food insecure, more than two million people internally displaced and 800,000 children out of school.

In all, around 6.3 million out of a population of 20 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance.

Falling off the agenda

“Yet, it has slipped off the international agenda and the resources made available are totally insufficient to respond to the scale of people’s needs,” said Mr. Türk.

Just last year, OHCHR documented 1,335 violations and abuses of human rights and humanitarian law, involving at least 3,800 civilian victims.

“Armed groups were responsible for the vast majority of violations against civilians in incidents involving more than 86 per cent of the victims. Protection of civilians is paramount. Such wanton violence must stop and the perpetrators held accountable.”

He said he understood the grave challenges faced by security forces and had been “encouraged by assurances that steps are being taken to ensure their conduct fully complies with international humanitarian and international human rights laws”.

The transition now needs to proceed “rooted in human rights”, he said, calling on the international community not to lose sight of the widespread needs in Burkina Faso.

Since the conflict erupted in April 2023, pitting the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the CRC – an independent body ensuring children’s rights and protections worldwide – has documented a litany of atrocities.

“There were worrying reports of rape of civilians, including children, denial of humanitarian access affecting children’s access to basic necessities and other violations of international law, including violations of children’s economic and social rights,” the Committee said in a news release.

The situation has thrust almost 24 million Sudanese children into jeopardy, with a staggering 14 million requiring urgent humanitarian assistance, 19 million deprived of education and four million displaced from their homes.

“Their conditions are appalling,” the Committee added, noting acute shortages of food and clean drinking water and severely limited access to healthcare and medicines.

Sharp increase in violations

The Committee also warned of a sharp increase in the number of children killed or falling victim to sexual violence as a weapon of war compared to a year ago.

Children are at higher risk given the widespread armed recruitment of children, particularly in Darfur and other areas, including eastern Sudan, it said.

“Schools across the country have either been destroyed or at least 170 campuses turned into emergency shelters for internally displaced people, thus jeopardizing children’s right to education for many years to come and exposing them to the risk of sexual exploitation and trafficking,” it added.

Decisive action

The Committee called on Sudan to immediately take all urgent and necessary measures to end the severe violations and fulfil its commitments under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, as well as to cooperate with the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan, established by the Human Rights Council in October 2023.

It also reminded the State of its obligations under the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, amid reports that both SAF and RSF recruited hundreds of children in Darfur and eastern Sudan.

“The Committee calls on Sudan to immediately stop recruiting children and to spare them from the impact of the military operations of the two parties,” the Committee said.

“I am appalled by the recurrent mass abductions of men, women and children in northern Nigeria. Children have been abducted from schools and women taken while searching for firewood. Such horrors must not become normalised,” he said.

News reports indicate at least 564 people have been abducted since 7 March. More than 280 pupils were abducted that day from a school in Kuriga town in Kaduna State.

At least 200 others, mostly internally displaced women and children, were also abducted on 7 March in Gamboru Ngala in Borno state while reportedly searching for firewood.

Two days later, gunmen stormed a boarding school in Gidan Bakuso village in Sokoto state and abducted at least 15 pupils. On 12 March, about 69 people were abducted in two raids on a village in the Kajuru area of Kaduna state.

Justice must be done

“I acknowledge the Nigerian authorities’ announcement that they are taking action to safely locate the missing children and reunite them with their families,” said the UN rights chief.

“I urge them to also ensure prompt, thorough and impartial investigations into the abductions and to bring those responsible to justice.”

He called for perpetrators to be identified and brought to account – in compliance with international human rights law – “as a first step towards reining in the impunity that feeds these attacks and abductions”.

Sudan: Hunger ‘pervasive’ in Khartoum streets, warns UNICEF

Hunger across Sudan is on the rise, especially in the capital Khartoum, due to a near year-long war between rival generals that sparked a spiralling humanitarian crisis.

In a new alert, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said that hunger and unaffordable food are now the main worry for desperate civilians.

© UNICEF/Ahmed Elfatih Mohamdee

A child flees from Wad Madani, Al Jazirah state east-central Sudan following recent armed clashes there.

Jill Lawler, UNICEF’s chief of field operations and emergency in Sudan, described to journalists in Geneva on Friday what she had seen in Omdurman just outside Khartoum, where she led the first UN mission to the Sudanese capital since war erupted in April last year.

“Hunger is pervasive; it is the number one concern people expressed,” she said.

“We met one young mother at a hospital whose three-month-old little child was extremely sick because she couldn’t afford milk, so had substituted goat milk, which led to diarrheal conditions. She wasn’t the only one.”

Ms. Lawler said the numbers of acutely malnourished children are rising, and the lean season hasn’t even begun.

She cited worrying projections that nearly 3.7 million children could be acutely malnourished this year in Sudan, including 730,000 who need lifesaving treatment.

The senior UNICEF officer also described how women and girls who had been raped in the first months of war were now delivering babies. Some had been abandoned to the care of hospital staff, who had built a nursery near the delivery ward, she said.

Around 7.5 million children need aid in Syria

After thirteen years of conflict in Syria, almost 7.5 million children in the country are in need of humanitarian assistance – more than at any other time during the conflict, said UNICEF on Friday.

Repeated cycles of violence and displacement, a crushing economic crisis,  extreme deprivation, disease outbreaks and last year’s devastating earthquakes have left hundreds of thousands of children exposed to long-term health issues.

More than 650,000 under-fives are chronically malnourished, representing an increase of around 150,000 recorded four years ago.

According to a recent household survey conducted in northern Syria, 34 per cent of girls and 31 per cent of boys reported psychosocial distress, UNICEF reported.

Child deaths will continue

“The sad reality is that today, and in the days ahead, many children in Syria will mark their 13th birthdays, becoming teenagers, knowing that their entire childhood to date has been marked by conflict, displacement and deprivation,” said UNICEF regional director for the Middle East and North Africa Adele Khodr.

Marking the grim anniversary of the start of Syria’s civil war, UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen emphasized the dire situation highlighting the unprecedented humanitarian crisis with millions in need of assistance, both inside and outside Syria.

He called for an immediate end to violence, the release of those arbitrarily detained and efforts to address the plight of refugees together with the internally displaced.

Latest graphic findings from the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine – created by the Human Rights Council two years ago – highlight the ongoing grave impact of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

“I lost any hope and the will to live,” one Ukrainian soldier and former prisoner of war told the Commission of Inquiry, describing how he had been “repeatedly subjected to torture and left with broken bones, broken teeth and gangrene” on an injured foot.

After trying to kill himself at a prison in the town of Donskoy in Tula region, south of Moscow, the soldier recounted how his captors “subjected him to further beating”, said Erik Møse, Commission Chair. 

“Victims’ accounts disclose relentless, brutal treatment inflicting severe pain and suffering during prolonged detention, with blatant disregard for human dignity. This has led to long-lasting physical and mental trauma,” he told journalists in Geneva.

“They beat him on his buttocks in the isolation ward, causing bleeding from his anus,” the investigators reported. “In the yard, they beat him on his face and injured foot, leading to bleeding. They knocked out some of his teeth. He begged them to kill him.”

UN News

Erik Møse, Chair of Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine (centre), Commissioner Vrinda Grover (left) and moderator Todd Pitman, OHCHR, at a press conference in Geneva

Rape, beatings

Testimonies of rape and other sexual attacks against women “also amount to torture”, the Commissioners maintained, pointing to threats of rape against male prisoners of war and the use of electric shocks intended to hurt or humiliate detainees.

“There were beatings, verbal abuse, electronic devices being used on areas, body parts, there was very limited access to food, water necessities,’ Mr. Møse continued. “The whole treatment of the prisoners of war and the picture drawn up, emerging from the way they were dealt with – how they were treated over long periods, months – enables us to use the word ‘horrific’”.

Graphic testimony

The 20-page report relies on testimonies from hundreds of individuals in order to investigate all alleged violations and abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law committed by Russian forces and authorities. 

The publication focuses on the siege and indiscriminate bombardment of Mariupol at the outset of the invasion, the use of torture and rape against civilians, prisoners of war and alleged collaborators, the unlawful transfer of 46 children from a care facility in Kherson to Russian-occupied Crimea in October 2022 and the destruction and damage of protected cultural treasures.

“The evidence shows that Russian authorities have committed violation of international human rights and international humanitarian law and corresponding war crimes,” insisted Commissioner Vrinda Grover. “Further investigations are required to determine whether some of the situations identified may constitute crimes against humanity.”

Mariupol and the ‘road to death’

Detailing the ordeal endured by all those besieged in the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, the report noted how survivors emerged from shelters and “recalled seeing large number of dead bodies on the streets in the rubble of their houses and in the cities’ hospitals”.

At least 58 medical centres were destroyed along with 11 power stations, the investigators said, adding that women who fled on foot from the front line called it “the road to death” and expressed a “pervasive feeling of fear”.

“Often, Russian armed forces failed to take feasible precautions to verify that the affected objects are not civilian,” maintained the rights experts, who work in an independent capacity and are not UN staff.

Genocidal intent concerns

Confirming continuing deep concerns about allegations of genocidal intent by the invading forces, Ms. Grover said the Human Rights Council-mandated probe would “look further” into likely “direct and public incitement to commit genocide” by Russian media.

“We have gone through a large number of such statements and have found that many of them used are using dehumanizing language and calls for hate, violence and destruction,” she said. “And we are concerned with statements supporting the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, calling for the killing of a large number of persons.”

The report is due to be presented to the Human Rights Council on Tuesday 19 March. Watch the launch in Geneva here: https://webtv.un.org/en/schedule/2024-03-19