UNITED NATIONS: Gang violence is surging in Haiti despite the deployment of a multinational force to prop up the struggling Caribbean country’s police, a top United Nations official warned Tuesday.
“The security situation remains extremely fragile, with renewed peaks of acute violence,” Maria Isabel Salvador, the UN secretary-general’s special representative to Haiti, told the Security Council.
Her update comes just weeks after 115 civilians were killed and dozens injured in a gang attack in the central town of Port Sonde.
Salvador cited that “horrific and brutal” event, and mentioned a series of other attacks in the capital Port-au-Prince, as well as sexual violence of “unheard-of brutality” against women and girls.
And with over 700,000 internally displaced persons, a 22 percent increase over the past three months, “the humanitarian situation is even more dire,” she said.
“Haitians continue to suffer across the country as criminal gang activities escalate and expand beyond Port-au-Prince, spreading terror and fear, overwhelming the national security apparatus,” she said.
She voiced concern about Haiti’s political process, saying that “despite initial advances, which I reported in July, is now facing significant challenges, turning hope into deep concern.”
The violence comes despite the presence of a UN-backed multinational mission to support the overwhelmed Haitian police, which began deploying during the summer.
In a recent report, UN chief Antonio Guterres noted that Haitian police, supported by the Kenya-led mission, “launched large-scale anti-gang operations” in several districts of the capital, “but still face challenges to sustain control over these areas due to the lack of personnel and other resources.”
The mission, whose mandate was recently extended by one year, currently has some 430 police and military personnel, mainly Kenyans, and 600 additional Kenyans are expected soon, but the mission is still “cruelly” underfunded and undersupplied, complained Salvador.
The UN is particularly concerned about children, who represent half of the displaced population and who fall prey to gangs.
UNICEF chief Catherine Russell estimated that children make up 30 to 50 percent of members of armed groups.
“They are used as informants, cooks, sex slaves, and forced to commit armed violence themselves,” Russell said.
Guterres lamented that children affiliated with gangs can become victims of mob justice.
He reported a 10-year-old boy who was shot dead and his body burned by a vigilante group in the capital Port-au-Prince in July after he was accused of being a gang informant.
Violence still rising in Haiti despite support mission: UN
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Violence still rising in Haiti despite support mission: UN
UN experts condemn US move to strip migrant children of legal aid
- Trump’s immigration crackdown, including an effort to deport hundreds of thousands of migrant children who entered the US without their parents
WASHINGTON: UN human rights experts on Tuesday denounced the Trump administration’s decision last year to cut legal aid for unaccompanied children in US immigration proceedings. The condemnation came days after UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk urged the Trump administration to ensure that its migration policies respect individual rights and international law.
“Denying children their rights to legal representation and forcing them to navigate complex immigration proceedings without legal counsel is a serious violation of the rights of children,” said the independent experts, who are appointed by the UN Human Rights Council.
The White House dismissed the experts and said it had made attempts to locate children it says were smuggled into the United States under the previous administration, without elaborating with specific examples.
“No one takes the UN seriously because of their extreme bias and selective outrage – they should be praising the Administration for protecting children, not lying about our policies,” Abigail Jackson, a spokeswoman for the White House, said.
In February, the US Department of the Interior ordered legal service providers working with the children to stop work and cut their funding. The providers sued over the move and a federal judge later temporarily restored the funding for the program. The cuts came amid President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, including an effort to deport hundreds of thousands of migrant children who entered the US without their parents.
The UN experts called the deportations unlawful and said they breached international human rights law prohibiting the removal of vulnerable groups, including children at risk of human trafficking. They also condemned the administration’s $2,500 offer to get the unaccompanied children to voluntarily leave the US
“Child-sensitive justice procedures should be guaranteed in all immigration and asylum proceedings affecting children,” said the experts, who have been in contact with the US government on the issue.
More than 600,000 migrant children have crossed the US-Mexico border without a parent or legal guardian since 2019, according to government data.
