The UN human rights office says it has turned up six more cases of alleged sexual abuse against children by European troops in the Central African Republic, including a seven-year-old girl who said she had to perform sexual acts on troops in exchange for water and cookies.
A UN team interviewed five girls and a boy who claimed their abusers were part of French and EU military operations in the troubled African nation, the office of EU High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad al-Hussein said.
The sexual abuse allegedly took place in 2014 in or near a camp for displaced people near M’Poko airport in the capital, Bangui, but only came to light this month, the latest in a string of similar allegations.
France, the Central African Republic’s former colonial ruler, deployed several thousand troops to the nation in late 2013 as violence between Christians and Muslims sent thousands fleeing from their homes. An African Union mission that began in April 2014 was taken over by a UN peacekeeping force five months later, while the EU force ended an 11-month mission in March last year.
At a news conference on Friday in New York, the UN announced new allegations against UN peacekeepers as well. UN Assistant Secretary-General Anthony Banbury came close to tears as he described four new child sex abuse cases involving UN troops and police from Bangladesh, Congo, Niger and Senegal.
He also announced an allegation of sexual assault against a minor by a member of a Moroccan military contingent serving with the earlier African Union mission.
For all of last year, Banbury said, there are likely to be 69 confirmed allegations of sexual abuse or exploitation in the UN’s 16 peacekeeping missions around the world, including 22 in the Central African Republic. That is up from 51 in 2014, when there were no reported cases in the Central African Republic, he said.
In a shift for the world body, Banbury said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon would issue a report next month with details of all allegations from last year, including the names of the nations whose troops are accused. The information, including the status of investigations, would be regularly updated online, he said.
“It’s hard to imagine the outrage that people working for the United Nations in the causes of peace and security feel when these kinds of allegations come to light,” Banbury said, his voice breaking.
The UN is under pressure to act more quickly after an independent panel last month described the world body’s “gross institutional failure” in handling similar allegations in the Central African Republic against French and other peacekeepers. The panel’s report said the months-long delay in addressing children’s accounts of abuse had led to even more reported assaults.
The UN can report such allegations, but nations themselves are responsible for prosecuting their troops over such crimes. Many do not.
The UN rights office said three of the girls said they believed their abusers were members of a Georgian contingent within an EU force, while another girl was allegedly abused by a soldier from another European nation that was not named because “additional corroboration is needed” in that case.
UN staffers interviewed a seven-year-old girl and nine-year-old boy who said they had been abused by troops in the French “Sangaris” operation. The girl said she had performed “oral sex on French troops in exchange for a bottle of water and a sachet of cookies,” the statement from Zeid’s office said.
The EU’s foreign affairs service said the EU was informed of the allegations on Jan. 19 and immediately offered assistance to the UN investigators.
“The EU takes these allegations very seriously,” the statement said.
The Georgian Ministry of Defense said it received the allegations “with great concern,” adding that “it is our goal to investigate this matter in great detail and in case such grave crimes are proven, perpetrators of such crimes will be brought to justice.”
Rupert Colville, a spokesman for Zeid’s office, estimated that troops from “something like 10” foreign military contingents in the Central African Republic have been embroiled in sexual misconduct allegations. He said it was difficult to estimate how many individual soldiers might have been involved.
“What is abundantly clear... is that it’s been rampant,” Colville told reporters. “What this does show is this is a problem with armies, with the military forces, and for whatever reason not enough is being done to stop this happening — the message doesn’t seem to have got through.”
He said he was unaware of any convictions so far in any of the cases that have been brought to light.
Banbury said the UN was taking new steps to protect against sexual abuse, promote accountability and assist victims. Every single member of peacekeeping forces is now vetted, he said, and those involved in prior misconduct, human-rights violations or serious crimes are not allowed to serve.
Other changes include acting within 24 hours of an allegation to collect evidence. The UN is also asking troop-contributing nations to conclude their investigations of allegations within six months and report results — and “we now proactively suspend payments for personnel who are credibly accused of abuse,” Banbury said.
He also urged others to come forward with allegations, saying that people who do not report the information they receive are “complicit in the crime.”
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS