March 2021 – The listing and delisting of state armed forces and armed groups that commit grave violations against children in the UN Secretary-General’s annual reports is a critical tool to hold perpetrators accountable and promote concrete impact through engagement of listed parties on action plans. However, the Secretary-General’s 2020 decision to remove the Saudi-led coalition and Myanmar’s Tatmadaw despite evidence of ongoing serious violations has weakened its credibility and threatens to undermine this system for protecting children.
Watchlist joins ten international civil society organizations in a joint statement to the Human Rights Council to call upon the UN Secretary-General to initiate a due diligence procedure to ensure that annual report’s annexes accurately and consistently reflect the evidence collected and verified by the UN’s Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism, and the listing and de-listing criteria are consistently applied, as defined by the 2010 Annual Report.
Read the joint statement here.
