Refugee children also face particular risks calling for specific protection measures. While UNHCR has issued guidelines addressing such risks, implementation of these guidelines has not been consistent. In 1996, Human Rights Watch received reliable reports of a case in which the UNHCR failed to protect from recruitment about one hundred unaccompanied Sudanese boys under eighteen who were taken from a UNHCR refugee camp in Fugnido, Ethiopia in March and April 1996. The boys were recruited by the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), which has a base near the refugee camp. These conscripted boys, who included twenty Nuba and eighty Dinka, had been living in Nasir and Maiwut in Upper Nile province, Sudan, between 1991 and 1995, and had been registered by UNICEF and other agencies during that time. Among the eighty Dinka boys were those who crossed the border from Sudan to Ethiopia in June and July 1995, seeking and finding their relatives in the Fugnido refugee camp. Many of the boys, sent to fight in Pochalla on the Sudan/Ethiopia border in March 1996 when the SPLA retook that town from the Sudan government, reportedly died in battle.
This was not the first occasion on which the UNHCR failed to protect unaccompanied minors from recruitment in Ethiopia. From 1987 to 1991, Sudanese boys in Ethiopia were housed in separate facilities from the rest of the refugee population in UNHCR camps. They were given military training by the SPLA and then deployed to fight as the "Red Army" in Sudan and Ethiopia. Human Rights Watch has also received reports of the forcible recruitment by the SPLA of underage Sudanese boys from the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya in early 1996.
The UNHCR's Guidelines on the Protection and Care of Refugee Children, 1994, Section 7, Article III, state that refugee children must be protected from military recruitment and advocate steps to protect children from such recruitment, including providing proper security and relocating camps or settlements if they are in danger of being raided by military forces. Human Rights Watch has protested the incidents described above to the UNHCR, but has received no accounting of what responses, if any, were undertaken or of plans to prevent such recruitment in the future. While ultimate responsibility for the protection of refugee children must lie with governments, UNHCR should take vigorous steps to protect children in accordance with its own guidelines, including protection from recruitment by armed forces.