Government defends child rights record

Regional instability has strongly impacted Guinea’s ability to promote and protect children’s rights, a government delegation told the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child yesterday. In explaining how the country was complying with the provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the delegation said that Guinea was surrounded by six countries suffering from civil strife and that an increase in its defence budget had curbed the amount of funding allocated to the social sectors, according to a UN press release. The committee of independent human rights experts is reviewing Guinea’s initial report on how it is implementing the child’s rights treaty. The government report said that the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia in particular had had a strong impact on Guinea, which had “opened its doors wide to nearly a million refugees”, over 65 percent of whom were children. The government had used funds to help refugees in difficulty, it said. In presenting the report to the 10-member committee meeting in Geneva, Minister for Social Affairs, Women and Children, Hadja Saran Daraba, said lack of financial and skilled human resources had made it difficult to fully implement the provisions of the Convention. She said that 40 percent of the population were living below the poverty line and did not even have one dollar a day to live on. The committee’s debate on Guinea was expected to conclude today. (For more information, please see http://www.unhchr.ch)