“I am highly concerned by the scale and severity of the grave violations that were committed against children in 2016, which included alarming levels of killing and maiming, recruitment and use and denial of humanitarian access,” Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says in the draft. The UN chief said minors often fell prey as well to sexual violence and abduction.
The report found some 4,000 verified cases of rape last year by government troops in conflicts around the world and more than 11,500 rapes by non-government armed groups. He called on the parties to conflicts around the world to do more to protect children, singling out the plight of Yemeni minors, where a Saudi-led military coalition has stepped in on behalf of the government.
More than 8,400 people have been killed and 47,700 wounded since Saudi Arabia and its allies intervened. The United Nations has called Yemen “the largest humanitarian crisis in the world.”
“Attacks carried out by air caused over half of all child casualties, with at least 349 killed and 333 injured,” the draft report found. The Saudi-led coalition began an air campaign in Yemen in March 2015 to defeat Iran-allied Houthi rebels. It will be up to Guterres to decide whether to return the Saudi-led coalition to a child rights blacklist annexed to the report. The coalition was briefly added last year and then removed by then-UN chief Ban Ki-moon pending a review.
At the time, Ban accused Saudi Arabia of exerting “unacceptable” undue pressure after sources told Reuters that Riyadh threatened to cut its funding of UN programmes. Saudi Arabia denied threatening Ban. The Saudi-led coalition had been named on the blacklist last year after the UN report blamed it for 60% of child deaths and injuries in Yemen in 2015 and half the attacks on schools and hospital.
Saudi Arabia’s UN mission said in a statement on Wednesday that there was “no justification whatsoever” for including the coalition’s name on the blacklist. It declined to comment on the findings in the draft report for 2016.
The report, which officials say is likely to be published next month, is issued in Guterres’ name but was drafted by his special envoy for children and armed conflict, Virginia Gamba. It is produced at the request of the UN Security Council. “The United Nations was informed of measures taken by the coalition in 2016 to reduce the impact of conflict on children,” according to the draft report. “However, despite these measures, grave violations against children continued at unacceptably high levels in 2016.”
The draft report said the Houthi rebels and affiliated forces were responsible for nearly a third of the total 1,340 child casualties verified by the United Nations. UN spokesman Farhan Haq said Guterres received a draft of the 2016 report this week and was due to discuss it with Gamba. “It’s still a work in progress,” Haq said.
