(United Nations Meetings Coverage and Press Releases) – The Security Council today reiterated its strong condemnation of the recruitment and use of children by parties to armed conflict, as well as their killing and maiming, rape and other forms of sexual violence. Issuing presidential statement S/PRST/2017/21 at its debate on children and armed conflict, the Council […]

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(The Canadian Press ) – Canada has been quietly championing an initiative aimed at preventing the recruitment and use of child soldiers, which is expected to be unveiled at a major peacekeeping summit in Vancouver next month. Australia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gillian Bird, revealed the initiative in New York on Wednesday while addressing a UN special […]

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(Reuters) – The United Nations Security Council established a Mali sanctions regime on Tuesday that allows the body to blacklist anyone who violates or obstructs a 2015 peace deal, hinders the delivery of aid, commits human rights abuses or recruits child soldiers. Anyone added to the blacklist would be subjected to a global travel ban or […]

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(AFP) – Nine child soldiers were handed over on Friday to UN peacekeepers in the Mali city of Kidal, which is controlled by a former rebel group, a UN spokesman announced in New York. “Good news from our colleagues in the peacekeeping mission in Mali…. Nine child combatants were handed over to the UN mission […]

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(AFP) – Former rebels are holding child prisoners in their stronghold city of Kidal following clashes with a rival armed group in northern Mali, the United Nations said Thursday. Fighting between the ex-rebels of the Coordination of Movements of Azawad (CMA) and the pro-government Platform group has worsened in recent weeks in northern Mali, in repeated violation […]

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(Reuters, AFP) – As renewed infighting among Tuareg groups threatens to derail a 2015 peace agreement, the UN has found mass graves in a northern Mali town. It also found evidence of the forced disappearance of children. Link

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(HRW) – The human rights climate in northern and increasingly central Mali remains precarious as a result of abuses and intimidation by Islamist armed groups, bloody intercommunal clashes, surges in violent crime and rights violations by state security forces engaged in counterterrorism operations. Slow implementation of the 2015 peace accord and the failure to disarm thousands […]

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(AFP) – Suspected Islamic extremists have wrecked a primary school in central Mali out of hostility to Western-style education, local administrators and paramilitary police said.”Armed jihadists who are ‘against Western schools’ attacked, sacked and burned classrooms in the primary school in the Ndodjiga district”, a local official told AFP, asking not to be named. Link

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