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Myanmar’s military junta is responsible for shocking violence against children caught up in the bloody aftermath of last February’s coup, a top independent Human Rights Council-appointed investigator said on Wednesday.
Three months since his last update to the UN rights forum in Geneva, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, Thomas Andrews, said that he’d met youngsters who’d fled the country after suffering “irreparable harm”.
Myanmar’s military junta is responsible for shocking violence against children caught up in the bloody aftermath of last February’s coup, a top independent Human Rights Council-appointed investigator said on Wednesday.
Three months since his last update to the UN rights forum in Geneva, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, Thomas Andrews, said that he’d met youngsters who’d fled the country after suffering “irreparable harm”.
The Rohingya people of Myanmar are experiencing what has been called a campaign of ethnic cleansing in the country. Over 600,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar, arriving to refugee camps in Bangladesh. "Six out of ten of the new arrivals in the Bangladesh camps are children," according to this article from Reuters, "providing a fertile hunting ground for traffickers looking for young girls to recruit as maids." One of the Rohingya people in the camp, Nazir Ahmed, has set up an information center to reunify children with their families.
Nearly a million people of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar have fled to Bangladesh since August - and are now living in refugee camps in the port town of Cox's Bazar - to escape what the UN has deemed 'ethnic cleansing' in the Rakhine state of Myanmar, according to this article from the Guardian. More than half of those refugees, says UNICEF, are children, about 40,000 of whom, says the article, have lost at least one parent. Efforts are underway to reunite families, but the system is stressed with the number of separated families looking to find each other. Furthermore, the…
Myanmar's Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement, with the support of UNICEF, has launched the ‘Guidelines on Registration and Support for Voluntary Organisations and the Minimum Standards of Care and Protection for Children (MSC) in Residential Facilities’ to improve the care of children living in all residential care facilities in the country.
Read the Guidelines and the Minimum Standards in Myanmar language. English translations pending.
UNICEF estimates suggest that over 1,100 Rohingya children fleeing violence in western Myanmar have arrived unaccompanied in Bangladesh since August 25.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZAe7_W4s-o&ab_channel=AFPNewsAgency
This article from the Guardian notes that UNICEF warns of voluntourism potentially moving into Myanmar.
Friends International, a member of the Steering Group of the Better Volunteering Better Care Initiative, established the ChildSafe Movement in 2005 to advocate for better child protection policies and practices, particularly in relation to travel and tourism. According to the article, the ChildSafe Movement has now “revamped” its company certification, which recognizes tourism companies for their dedication to child protection and commitment to ChildSafe’s 7 Standards by granting them a “ChildSafe Certification.” EXO Travel in Cambodia, Lao PDR, Thailand, Vietnam and Myanmar has become the…
In this article, the author recounts her experience of being invited into an orphanage while on a tour of Dala, Myanmar as though the orphanage were a tourist site. According to the article, the tour guide claimed the orphanage was a popular tourism spot and it is not the only orphanage in the country welcoming tourists. Orphanage tourism, says the author, is on the rise in Myanmar and in other countries in the region such as Cambodia and Thailand. Some tourists choose to volunteer at these orphanages but, cautions the author, they are often doing more harm than good by “inadvertently…