View previous stories
	Armed conflicts are tearing apart vast swathes of the world by ReliefWeb, agencies   Report of the UN Secretary-General on the protection of civilians in armed conflict.   Armed conflicts are tearing apart vast swathes of the world and record numbers of people are in need of humanitarian assistance and protection. Some 97 per cent of humanitarian assistance goes to complex emergencies, the majority of which involve armed conflicts.   Globally, more than 65 million people have been displaced by conflict, violence or persecution. More than 20 million people, including 1.4 million children, are on the brink of famine in Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen. At the same time, among the international community there is a growing sense of fatigue, even resignation, in addressing the suffering of civilians in conflict.   All State and non-State parties to conflict must respect international humanitarian law, and all States must ensure such respect. Yet, in many conflicts, parties flout their obligations and show contempt for human life and dignity, often with impunity.   Civilians are routinely killed in direct and indiscriminate attacks. As conflict becomes increasingly urbanized, the impact on civilians reaches new lows, with bombs and rockets destroying schools, hospitals, markets and places of worship, while children are pulled from the rubble of their homes.   Sexual violence shatters lives and undermines community cohesion. These horrors are exacerbated when civilians are deprived of basic relief items and services, sometimes even besieged for months at a time. Faced with such brutality, millions of civilians are forced to flee their homes in search of safety. The result is a global protection crisis.   In the present report I set out a path to protection, my vision for collective action to strengthen the protection of civilians in armed conflict. My overarching priority is to galvanize the international community to prevent and resolve conflicts and build sustainable peace.   In the long term, the best way to protect civilians is to tackle the root causes of conflicts, promote human rights and the rule of law, strengthen governance and institutions and invest in inclusive and sustainable development.   There must be a shift from perpetual reaction to early action, including the ability to identify and act upon signs of impending or potential conflict and threats to civilians.   A commitment to conflict prevention also compels us to address illicit and irresponsible arms transfers, which enable conflict and undermine protection and peacebuilding efforts. Indeed, although beyond the scope of the present report, my vision of prevention encompasses not only violent armed conflict, but also the increasingly complex array of crises that take a significant toll on humanity and produce unsustainable levels of human suffering.   Where prevention fails, we must make every effort to protect the lives and dignity of civilians caught up in conflict. In this regard, three protection priorities clearly emerge across conflicts.   First, we must enhance respect for international humanitarian law and international human rights law and promote good practice by parties to conflict.   Second, we must protect the humanitarian and medical mission and accord priority to the protection of civilians in United Nations peace operations.   Third, we must prevent forced displacement and pursue durable solutions for refugees and internally displaced persons. These protection priorities are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. In particular, strengthening respect for international law is a prerequisite to achieving priorities two and three.   Achieving these goals necessitates a multi-faceted approach encompassing a diversity of actors. An intensified global effort is needed at the international, regional and national levels to raise public understanding of the human cost of conflict and enhance respect for international law and the protection of civilians. The Security Council and Member States must be at the forefront of this effort.   In the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Member States committed themselves to leaving no one behind and to reaching those furthest behind first. The World Humanitarian Summit, held in 2016, reinforced this vision.   Member States must now take specific action to implement their commitments and ensure that civilians in conflict, who are among the most vulnerable, are protected. I am personally committed to ensuring that this becomes a priority in all aspects of United Nations work. http://bit.ly/2q9Dk6x   March 2018   Making Atrocity Prevention more Effective.   This conference, co-hosted by the Stanley Foundation, The Columbia Global Policy Initiative (CPGI), and the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and Responsibility to Protect (UNOSAPG), convened experts from the atrocity prevention, development, and peacebuilding fields to share and reflect on the initial findings from the first phase of the Atrocity Prevention Research Project, launched by CGPI and UNOSAPG. Participants and speakers are invited from civil society, government, and multilateral organizations, to reflect on practical lessons learned from experts in prevention and will include the lead authors on the country case studies involved in the research, watch the webcast: http://bit.ly/2GckliS   http://bit.ly/2GLe1Mm http://www.gaamac.org/blogs/show/making-atrocity-prevention-effective http://www.gaamac.org/organizations/ http://www.globalr2p.org/ http://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/prevention.html   Children and R2P: The Global Responsibility to Protect, by Luke Glanville. (Brille Online)   This is an extract from the introduction to a special issue on Children and R2P profiles the parallel development of the R2P and Children and Armed Conflict agendas over the last two decades and surveys how key R2P documents developed during this period have engaged with issues of child protection.   'A bullet hit my foot. I think they shot me by mistake. They meant to shoot big people' - Muhammad Yunus, Rohingya child, 2017.   'In situations of mass violence, children are particularly vulnerable. Far too often, they are intentional targets of violence, victims of indiscriminate violence, and traumatised witnesses of violence against others. They are disproportionately affected by war, being at greater risk of malnutrition and disease and highly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.   Children make up half the world's 22.5 million refugees. And things are only getting worse.   At the close of 2017, unicef warned that children in conflict zones around the world are under attack at a shocking scale as parties to conflicts blatantly disregard international laws designed for their protection:   'In conflicts around the world, children have become frontline targets, used as human shields, killed, maimed and recruited to fight. Rape, forced marriage, abduction and enslavement have become standard tactics in conflicts from Iraq, Syria and Yemen, to Nigeria, South Sudan and Myanmar. Millions more children are paying an indirect price for these conflicts, suffering from malnutrition, disease and trauma as basic services - including access to food, water, sanitation and health - are denied, damaged or destroyed in the fighting'.   In Yemen, unicef details, three years of fighting has left 5,000 children dead or injured, 385,000 children severely malnourished and at risk of death, and more than 11 million children in need of humanitarian assistance. In South Sudan, four years of civil war has seen 19,000 children recruited into armed groups and over 2,300 killed or injured.   In Myanmar, Rohingya children have suffered and seen horrific violence and comprise more than half of the 650,000 forcibly displaced to Bangladesh since mid-2017. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2017 saw 200 health centres and 400 schools attacked and 850,000 children driven from their homes by violence. And in northeast Nigeria and Cameroon in same period, Boko Haram forced at least 135 children to act as suicide bombers.   Readers of this Global Responsibility to Protect journal will know well that states unanimously acknowledged their responsibility to protect populations from atrocity crimes at the UN World Summit in 2005. In a section of the World Summit Outcome Document titled 'Responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity', heads of state and government accepted a responsibility to protect their own populations from these crimes, to encourage and assist other states to do the same, and, where necessary, to take peaceful and even coercive measures in accordance with the un Charter to ensure that populations are protected.   Perhaps less well known is that this section of the Outcome Document was immediately followed by a section titled 'Children's rights'. In this section, heads of state and government expressed their 'dismay at the increasing number of children involved in and affected by armed conflict, as well as all other forms of violence, including domestic violence, sexual abuse and exploitation and trafficking and their support for cooperation policies aimed at strengthening national capacities to improve the situation of those children and to assist in their rehabilitation and reintegration into society.   They committed themselves to 'respecting and ensuring the rights of each child without discrimination of any kind', and called upon all states to become parties to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which the un General Assembly adopted in 1989. Six months after the Summit, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1674 on the theme of Protection of Civilians, which reaffirmed both the provisions of the 2005 Outcome Document regarding the Responsibility to Protect (r2p) and the various resolutions adopted by the council since 1999 on the theme of Children and Armed Conflict (caac) that formed the basis for the Outcome Document's provisions for children's rights.   The r2p and caac agendas have obvious commonalities. They both emerged during the 1990s and early 2000s in response to debates and dilemmas about how to protect civilians in conflict situations. Both are a product of a desire to conceptualise and cultivate effective local and international action to ensure such protection. While the seeds of r2p were being sown in the mid-1990s by Francis Deng and Roberta Cohen at the UN and the Brookings Institute, developing a concept of 'sovereignty as responsibility' in response to a crisis of internal displacement, and by policy-makers and commentators, wrestling with the controversial concept of 'humanitarian intervention' in response to the repeated outbreak of mass atrocities around the world, others were thinking through how to better promote and protect the rights of children caught up in such crises.   Most crucial was a report written by Graca Machel titled 'Impact of Armed Conflict on Children', submitted to the General Assembly in 1996. The report drew attention to the disproportionate impact of war on children and stressed local and international responsibilities to ensure their protection, using language that anticipated r2p.   'Preventing conflicts from escalating is a clear responsibility of national Governments and the international community and the impact of armed conflict on children is an area in which everyone shares responsibility and a degree of blame', Machel stated:   'It is unconscionable that we so clearly and consistently see children's rights attacked and that we fail to defend them. It is unforgivable that children are assaulted, violated, murdered and yet our conscience is not revolted nor our sense of dignity challenged. This represents a fundamental crisis of our civilization. The impact of armed conflict on children must be everyone's concern and is everyone's responsibility; Governments, international organizations and every element of civil society. Each one of us, each individual, each institution, each country, must initiate and support global action to protect children. Local and national strategies must strengthen and be strengthened through international mobilization'.   The following year, the UN Secretary-General appointed the first Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict. The year after that, the Security Council held its first open debate on the theme of caac and issued a Presidential Statement expressing its intention to pay serious attention to the situation of children and armed conflicts.   In 1999, the council adopted its first resolution on the theme, strongly condemning 'killing and maiming, sexual violence, abduction and forced displacement, recruitment and use of children in armed conflict', as well as attacks on schools and hospitals, and committing itself 'to remain actively seized of the matter'. http://bit.ly/2IHuQsb http://r2pasiapacific.org/ Visit the related web page
	Instruments of Pain: Conflict and Famine by International Crisis Group   Apr. 2017   For the first time in three decades, four countries, driven by war, verge on famine. Over coming weeks, Crisis Group will publish special briefings on Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia and Nigeria. Each conflict requires tailored response; all need increased aid and efforts to end the violence.   The last time the UN declared a famine was in 2011, in Somalia. The last time it faced more than one major famine simultaneously was more than three decades ago. Today we are on the brink of four - in Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia and South Sudan.   The spectre of famine is primarily the result of war, not natural disaster. According to the UN, more than twenty million people, millions of them children, are at risk of starvation.   This is happening in man-made crises and under the Security Council's watch. In some places, the denial of food and other aid is a weapon of war as much as its consequence. Combatants fighting tactics often make the problem worse.   Both sides of Yemen's conflict, for example, fight with little to no regard for the local population. The Huthis and former President Ali Abdullah Saleh's forces, on one hand, and their opponents in the Saudi Arabia-led coalition, on the other, have repeatedly strangled the flow of aid and commodities to areas controlled by their rivals. The impending Saudi-led push to recapture the Red Sea coast, including the port of Hodeida - the main entry point for imports on which much of the country depends - and the battle that offensive will provoke risk creating another major chokehold on supplies.   Elsewhere, too, the actions of governments and their opponents exact high humanitarian tolls. In north-east Nigeria, Boko Haram's attacks on rural communities and the destruction wrought by fighting between its insurgents and the military caused the acute food crisis. The curtailing by Lake Chad basin states of economic activity, aimed at weakening the insurgency, has damaged communities livelihoods and increased their vulnerability.   Fighting in South Sudan often involves indiscriminate killing of civilians, sexual violence and pillage by state and non-state armed actors alike. Civilians in Southern Unity state must constantly flee armed groups, rendering them unable to farm or receive assistance and creating conditions for famine. Many resort to hiding in swamps; to seek food is to risk attack.   The risk of famine is thus closely tied to the spike, over recent years, in war and its fallout, particularly mounting human suffering. Critical norms, including adherence to International Humanitarian Law (IHL), are fast eroding. For the first time in a generation, most indicators suggest the world is becoming more dangerous.   The Nigerians, Somalis, South Sudanese and Yemenis over whom famine looms have already suffered intense, in some cases protracted conflict. The impact on those most affected is more than a passing tragedy. The displacement, destruction to livestock and local communities and the threat of a lost generation, without education or socio-economic prospects, hinder prospects for building sustainable peace.   Beginning with the publication of the special briefing Instruments of Pain (I): Conflict and Famine in Yemen, and continuing over the next few weeks with similar special briefings on South Sudan, Nigeria and Somalia, Crisis Group will describe these crises roots and the measures necessary to prevent their further deterioration.   Each requires a unique response: challenges of access and funding vary, as do ways to quiet and eventually end the wars that have increased risks of famine.   Overall, though, governments of the states affected and their backers should:   Show far greater respect for IHL, particularly by allowing in aid and protecting those delivering it. They must avoid tactics that contribute to the risk of famine, like the Hodeida offensive, the curtailing of Lake Chad basin trading or predation in Southern Unity state;   Increase and sustain funds for relief efforts. Shortfalls are not the only financial challenge in Yemen, for example, the central bank's failure to pay public sector salaries has left many Yemenis unable to buy food that is available.   But humanitarian efforts in all four crises are chronically underfunded. The spike in war over recent years, which has already caused more civilian casualties, mass displacement and terrorism, now threatens to starve millions. Without redoubled efforts to end those conflicts, 2017 promises to be not the low-water mark, but rather a way-station on the descent to something far worse.   http://www.crisisgroup.org/global/instruments-pain-conflict-and-famine Visit the related web page
	View more stories