Violations of children’s rights are increasing in conflict areas

United nations. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) today highlighted the alarming increase in grave violations of the rights of children living in conflict areas in recent years.

A UN entity has recorded 266,000 violations against minors committed and reported over the past 16 years in more than 30 conflict situations in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, according to a report released on Friday.

The report added that the actual numbers should be much higher than those cases confirmed through the Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism on Children and Armed Conflict, a procedure established in 2005 to systematically document such violations.

Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria and Ethiopia are among the countries where thousands of children were subjected to violations during the past year due to wars and confrontations.

For example, the largest number of verified child casualties since 2005 corresponds to Afghanistan, at over 28,500, representing 27 percent of all confirmed casualties worldwide.

Similarly, the Middle East and North Africa are the regions with the highest number of verified attacks against schools and hospitals, with 22 such attacks recorded in the first six months of this year.

As UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore has emphasized, year after year the conflicting parties are again showing a terrible disregard for the rights and well-being of children, who suffer and die because of this insensitivity.

In this sense, he asked to do everything in his power and to take concrete measures to protect them from harm. Although there are no official UNICEF figures for the current year, in 2020 the United Nations verified 26,425 serious violations of children’s rights in conflict zones.