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The Philippines has urged its removal from the United
Nations’ list of countries with child soldiers, stressing that it
condemns the practice by various rebel groups, the foreign
department said Wednesday.
Ambassador Hilario Davide Jr.,
Manila’s envoy to the UN, made the call during a meeting of the UN
Security Council Working Group on Children and Armed Conflict in New
York on May 8.
Davide said the Philippines has
put in place a “legal firewall for the protection of children”
and advised the UN to focus on countries “facing worse
circumstances” involving child soldiers.
“The Philippines condemns
non-state actors in the country who recruit, abduct, and use
children, yet deny their illegal and unjustifiable deeds,” Davide
said.
Through a Security Council
resolution, the Philippines was listed in 2005 over reports that the
communist New People’s Army, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF)
and the Abu Sayyaf used children as combatants.
The communist rebels admitted
using children in non-combat duties, although there have been cases
of communist child soldiers arrested by military intelligence.
Children are also often seen in MILF training camps on the southern
island of Mindanao.
Radhika Coomaraswamy, the UN’s
special representative for children in conflict, said the
Philippines’ listing was not meant to embarrass the country, but
to acknowledge that the problem exists.
Coomaraswamy cited a United
Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) study saying that the MILF adopts
orphans to train as fighters, while the New People’s Army is known
to employ children as porters, cooks and couriers.
But a Unicef-commissioned study
released in December 2007 did not uncover any instance of forced
conscription of children into military or military-support activity
by any of the insurgent groups covered in the study.
The 12,000-strong MILF has been
waging a rebellion since 1978 for an independent Islamic state in
Mindanao. Talks with the group were suspended last year. The New
People’s Army, meanwhile, has been waging a low-intensity Maoist
insurgency since 1969.
--AFP
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