Child sex abuse allegations expose issues at U.N.
UNITED NATIONS – The boys said they approached the French soldiers because they were. hungry. Some were so young they didn’t quite understand the acts the soldiers demanded in return. One boy, 8 or 9 years old, said he did it several times to the same soldier, “until one day an older kid saw him and told him what he was doing was bad.”
U.N. investigators heard such stories of sexual abuse from several boys in May and June 2014 in Central African Republic, where French soldiers were protecting a sprawling displaced persons camp in the conflict-torn capital, Bangui.
One year later, revelations about how the U.N. handled the boys’ accounts have horrified people both inside and outside the world body. Statements marked “strictly confidential” have shown that its top human rights officials failed to follow up for several months on the allegations.
Saturday, the high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Raad al-Hussein, said his office was sending a team to Central African Republic to look into what the statement called “possible further measures to address human rights violations,” including sexual violence. The office also will ask “concerned states” what they have done to investigate them and prosecute anyone.
No arrests have been announced, and it’s not clear where the accused soldiers, who were supporting a U.N. peacekeeping force, are now. The U.N. seems unable to say when the abuses stopped, or how long it continued to investigate.
Friday, more documents were released by a nongovernmental organization run by two former U.N. staffers that’s calling for an independent investigation into the case. The documents show U.N. officials scrambling not so much to help a French inquiry into the allegations but to investigate the human rights staffer who told French authorities in the first place.
A separate report with the children’s allegations, obtained by the Associated Press, says the first account was heard May 19 by a human rights staffer and a UNICEF child protection officer. The interviews continued through June 24.
The case has exposed a glaring weakness in a world body that considers human rights one of its three main pillars: It has no specific guidelines on how to handle allegations of child sexual abuse, and no requirement for immediate, mandatory reporting.
The children’s allegations didn’t make their way to top officials at U.N. headquarters in New York for months. Friday, U.N. peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous told reporters he first heard about them this spring. When asked why the mission in Central African Republic didn’t alert his office in New York right away, he said, “Some reporting lines maybe didn’t function.”