GENEVA: Russia inflicted unimaginable suffering on millions of Ukrainian children and violated their rights since its full scale invasion of Ukraine begun in 2022, a new report by the United Nations Human Rights Office said on Friday.
“Their rights have been undermined in every aspect of life, leaving deep scars, both physical and psychosocial,” said UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk.
The Russian Mission in Geneva did not respond to a request for comment when contacted by Reuters.
“In the four regions of Ukraine that were illegally annexed by the Russian Federation in 2022, children have been particularly affected by violations of international human rights law...including summary executions, arbitrary detention, conflict-related sexual violence, torture and ill-treatment,” the report said.
Five boys and two girls were summarily executed in 2022 and 2023, with the report noting that the willful killing of civilians was a war crime and a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions.
Some children had to take part in military-patriotic training, including singing the Russian anthem, and to follow the Russian school curriculum — in violation of international humanitarian law.
Child deportation and transfer
The transfer of at least 200 children within Russian occupied territory and to Russia between February 2022 and December 2024 may amount to war crimes, the report stated.
Previously Moscow said it had been protecting vulnerable children from a war zone.
Ukraine has called the abductions of tens of thousands of its children taken to Russia or Russian-occupied territory without the consent of family or guardians a war crime that meets the UN treaty definition of genocide.
In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued warrants for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova related to the abduction of Ukrainian children. Russia denounced the warrants as “outrageous and unacceptable.”
Russia failed to provide detailed information about the children to the Central Tracing Agency, thwarting families attempts to find them, the report said.
Some 50,000 people were reported missing in the war between Ukraine and Russia over the last year, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross in February.
More than 600 children were killed between Feb. 24, 2022 and Dec. 31, 2024 in Ukraine, including occupied territories, the UN Human Rights Office verified. At least 737,000 children had been internally displaced and a further 1.7 million were refugees.
UN condemns unimaginable suffering of Ukrainian children at hands of Russia
https://arab.news/ybb7a
UN condemns unimaginable suffering of Ukrainian children at hands of Russia
- ‘Their rights have been undermined in every aspect of life, leaving deep scars, both physical and psychosocial’
- Some 50,000 people were reported missing in the war between Ukraine and Russia over the last year
Spain fines Airbnb 64 mn euros for posting banned properties
- The fine is final, the consumer affairs ministry said in a statement, adding the US holiday-rental giant must “correct the violations by deleting illegal content“
MADRID: Spain’s leftist government said Monday it had fined Airbnb more than 64 million euros ($75 million), notably for posting listings for banned rental properties, at a time the country faces a housing crisis.
The fine is final, the consumer affairs ministry said in a statement, adding the US holiday-rental giant must “correct the violations by deleting illegal content.”
The ministry said 65,122 adverts on Airbnb breached consumer rules, including the promotion of properties without a license or those whose license number did not match with data in registers.
The fine is equivalent to six times the illegal profit made by Airbnb between the time the company was warned about the offending adverts and before they were taken down, the ministry added.
A tourism boom has driven the buoyant Spanish economy but fueled local concern about increasingly scarce and unaffordable housing, a top priority for the minority coalition government.
The world’s second most-visited country hosted a record 94 million foreign tourists in 2024 and is on course to surpass that figure this year.
But residents of hotspots such as Barcelona blame short-term rentals for the housing crisis and changing their neighborhoods.
In June, the consumer rights ministry also ordered online accommodation giant Booking.com to take down more than 4,000 illegal adverts.
“There are thousands of families who are living on the edge due to housing, while a few get rich with business models that expel people from their homes,” far-left consumer rights minister Pablo Bustinduy said in the ministry statement.
“We’ll prove it as many times as necessary: no company, no matter how big or powerful, is above the law. Even less so when it comes to housing,” he added on social network Bluesky.
