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U.N. Opens General Assembly on Child, Children Appeal to Security Council
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| Gabriela Azurduy Arrieta, a children's delegate from Bolivia, speaks at the United Nations children's summit |
UNITED
NATIONS, May 9 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - After being forced
to cancel the originally scheduled United Nations General Assembly on
the Child following the events of September 11, top-ranking officials
from 164 countries are in New York for a three-day United Nations
conference starting Wednesday on the plight of millions of children,
threatened by poverty, disease and war.
Following
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan speech, two teenage girls addressed
the United Nations General Assembly for the first time in history on
Tuesday, outlining a vision to free children from poverty, war and
disease. The purpose of this special session, attended by dozens of
child delegates sitting in the Assembly chamber alongside 70 heads of
state and government and other senior officials, is set to assess
progress made towards targets adopted at the first world summit on
children, in 1990.
Annan
said leaders of the world had failed deplorably to meet promises made
to improve the lot of children 12 years ago. He noted that one
third of the world's children had suffered malnutrition before the age
of five; a quarter had not been immunized against disease; and almost
a fifth was not in school.
"I
urge all the adults here to listen to them attentively," he said.
"To work for a world fit for children, we must work with
children."
The
previous world summit, which will discuss several controversial
issues, set out specific goals on health, education and poverty
reduction for improving the lives of children, but was less directly
concerned with the impact of warfare on children.
Graca
Machel, former first lady of both Mozambique and South Africa, told
council members that today "children in up to 85 countries
continue to live with the reality of abduction and forced recruitment
into military groups."
Recently,
the council has begun to address the problem, through a serious of
general resolutions and on a case-by-case basis. But its actions have
had only a limited impact, Machel said.
"Even
as we meet today, the might of the international community seems
unable to stop the criminal situation where tens of thousands of
children from northern Uganda have been abducted and forced into
military and sexual slavery over a period of more than a decade,"
she said.
Another
problem that has come center-stage since the 1990 summit is the sexual
and commercial exploitation of children. A Roman Catholic activist
group, Catholics for a Free Choice, said it would launch a campaign
this week calling on the U.N. to intervene against the abuses of
children by priests.
On
May 25, 2000, the General Assembly adopted two optional protocols to
the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, one to bar the use of
child soldiers, the other to outlaw exploitation of children.
"The
protocols have been very useful in generating more public
awareness," Bellamy told Agence France-Presse (AFP) in an
interview.
"Exploitation
is like AIDS; you've got to be prepared to acknowledge it exists if
you're going to go out and do something about it," she added.
Bellamy
acknowledged that since 1990, "there have been successes but
there should have been more," and noted that 11 million children
still die every year from wholly preventable causes.
"This
doesn't require big, five-star hospitals; we're talking about kids not
being immunized and about children who don't have access to safe water
or sanitation."
UNICEF's
message to the six-dozen heads of state or government attending the
conference would be the importance of leadership, Bellamy said.
"Unless
you have leadership you're not going to get the full benefits" of
plans of action or of the money to fund them.
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