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UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has published his annual report on children and armed conflict. It’s a regular “list of shame,” calling out state militaries and non-state armed groups for their grave violations against kids.

But not every abuser is on the list as they should be.

Worldwide in 2022, the UN report verified more than 24,000 instances in which armed forces or groups killed or injured children; subjected them to sexual violence, abduction, or recruitment as soldiers; or attacked schools and hospitals.

Quite rightly, Russia was added to this “list of shame” this year for its brutality against children in Ukraine.

Since Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow’s forces have killed and maimed hundreds of Ukrainian children in attacks on apartment buildings and other civilian structures. The UN says Russian forces were responsible for 480 attacks against schools and hospitals in 2022. That’s more than 25 percent of the total figure globally.

And let’s not forget, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, are both wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against children, specifically Russia’s mass abductions of Ukrainian kids.

But while Russia is on the UN’s “list of shame” for serious abuses against children, there is at least one curious omission from the UN list: Israel.

The UN secretary-general’s report does address the situation in Israel/Palestine, documenting 3,133 grave violations against 1,139 Palestinian children and 8 Israeli children in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and Israel. It goes into some detail about these violations, in fact.

And yet the UN secretary-general’s report fails to add Israel to the UN’s “list of shame” as it did with Russia.

Some say the reason is aggressive lobbying by the government of Israel, but surely the Kremlin was arguing Russia’s corner no less vigorously in the run-up to the report’s publication.

In any case, the omission does a terrible disservice to child victims in Israel/Palestine, and the question remains: why doesn’t the UN secretary-general value the lives of Palestinian children as much as the lives of Ukrainian children?

Apartheid in South Africa may seem like just a distant nightmare, but anyone over 60 in the country spent at least half their life under the system of extreme racial segregation.

For the majority of South Africa’s five and a half million older people, that meant decades being denied a good standard of education, decent work, and the ability to save for old age. The cumulative impact of those years – the lost opportunity, the unfulfilled potential – still deeply affects older people there today.

However, rather than addressing this legacy, the current government is compounding the problem.

It is failing to provide hundreds of thousands of older people access to basic care and support services. Many face risks to their physical well-being and safety, and experience profound distress and fear at the prospect of being forced to live, and die, in an institution.

It’s not supposed to be this way. A post-apartheid law – the Older Persons Act of 2006 – guarantees the rights of older people and provides for community- and home-based care and support services. These services should enable older people to continue to live in their own homes with the support they are entitled to.

But the South African government is often simply ignoring the law.

As my colleague and HRW South Africa researcher Noma Masiko-Mpaka, says in a new report: “Government policies are failing older people and sending a strong signal that the dignity of those who sacrificed so much for South Africa’s freedom no longer matters.”

(written by Aiza Rodrigues Akhtar)

Last week, the New York State Assembly approved the Tropical Deforestation-Free Procurement Act.   

The bill aims to ensure companies contracting with the state don’t contribute to tropical deforestation and human rights abuses overseas.  

New York is the third largest economy among US states and currently uses many products that causes deforestation, water contamination, exposure to toxic pesticide, exploitative labor conditions, child labor, displacement of rural communities, and violence against forest defenders.  

The bill would see companies provide public data demonstrating how they addressed relevant risks in their supply chains and identify precisely where their products originated.

It would prohibit products like soy, beef, palm oil, coffee, cocoa, and wood products from land deforested after January 1, 2023. Agricultural products would need to respect the land tenure rights of local communities, Indigenous people, and workers. 

If the governor signs the bill, New York could inspire other states, such as California, to do the same, boosting efforts across the US to help protect tropical forests and human rights around the world. 

(compiled by Lisa Maier)

• Venezuela: ICC investigation gets go-ahead (HRW) 
• Canada: migrants behind bars longer as feds extend immigration detention contracts (CBC) 
• Guantánamo: cruel, inhuman conditions according to UN investigation (NY Times) 
• Syrians in passport limbo during Assad’s victory lap (HRW) 

After yet another avoidable disaster at sea earlier this month, I noted here in this newsletter how mass drownings are to the EU what mass shootings are to the US.  

It keeps happening. And every time it happens, politicians pretend to be concerned, yet keep in place the government policies at the root of the problem. So, people keep dying.    

Off the back of these comments, AJE’s Listening Post program got in touch to discuss the EU’s “let them die” policy and how media coverage often fails to address the key issue: these are avoidable tragedies.

Watch here.