HRW Sends out S.O.S. in favour of refugee children

The U.S.-based NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) has accused the international community of neglecting Sierra Leonean refugee children living in camps in Guinea.

In a report released on 29 July, HRW also said that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had failed to ensure the security of the refugees and to prevent or respond to domestic violence, sexual abuse, and exploitation against refugee children.

"We're trying to do what we can within our limited resources," Marcellin Hepie, UNHCR Senior Programme Officer for West Africa, told IRIN on Friday. If UNHCR does not receive from the donor community the financing it needs to do its work, he said, the beneficiaries are affected.

UNHCR started a project in April to prevent sexual abuse and reduce prostitution to a minimum, according to the minutes of a meeting on 2 July between HRW and UNHCR officials. UNHCR initiatives in the camps also include an income-generating project for women, especially heads of households, whose cost, Hepie said, is around US $50,000.

"The more resources, we have the more we can do," Hepie said.

In its report, HRW also found that there was a link between lack of food security for the refugees and many of the abuses documented in the report.

Girls as young as 12, it said, testified that they had no choice but to prostitute themselves so as to feed themselves and, in some cases, their families.

HRW's Sarah Rakita said that "by and large it's a problem of resources and they (UNHCR) would love to do a better job for these children if they had the funding to do so".

HRW said donor countries had not contributed to the US $4 million appeal issued by UNHCR for moving the camps further inland, where the refugees would be safer from deadly cross border attacks by Sierra Leonean rebels to which they were exposed earlier this year.

A few refugees have been moved but, generally, the relocation has been delayed by heavy rains, which have made roads impassable, and by other logistical problems linked to the shortage of resources, according to UNHCR.

"It's been very hard to see, as I worked on this report, the discrepancy in resources that went to Kosovar refugees compared to Sierra Leonean refugees," Rakita told the BBC.

"The world has taken on the challenge to protect refugees in Europe," said Rachael Reilly, HRW's Refugee Policy Director. "African children deserve no less."