To 13-year-old Mumo Katumo, the anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child
(CRC) is an utter irrelevance. For the past year Mumo and her family
have been struggling to stay alive in the drought-ridden Masinga
district of eastern Kenya with little food or water and with no hope of
going to school.
Mumo describes the pain of her hunger: "You go
numb. You lose the ability to do anything. Sometimes I think it is like
the feeling of dying."
The
UN children's agency says one billion children around the world are
still deprived of food, shelter, clean water and healthcare 20 years
after the adoption of a treaty guaranteeing children's rights.
Hundreds of millions more children are constantly threatened by
violence, Unicef said in a report released on Thursday assessing the
situation two decades after the UN adopted the Convention of the Rights
of the Child on November 20 1989.
For most of her life, the young Afghan woman was fleeing war. But everywhere she went it stalked her.
"She was very quiet and shy, and you could barely hear her speak," said Ashley Jackson of Oxfam. "When the civil war began in the early 1990s, she left Kabul and went to the border. But her son was killed by a rocket attack.
"She went to Pakistan and lived in a refugee settlement, and her daughter was taken by a man who wanted her. When the Taliban fell and the family finally got back to Kabul, her husband was killed.
Speaking to a crowd of 900 survivors of state care who had gathered in
Canberra,
Mr
Rudd apologised for his country's role in the migrations, which
continued until the 1960s.
He also apologised to the 500,000 "Forgotten Australians" who were
taken from their families and placed in care homes around the country.
GENEVA - The international Red Cross on Thursday warned that the majority of the world's 26 million displaced people were often neglected because they found refuge with local communities instead of in camps.
"The focus on camps means that what happens to the majority of displaced people -- those who seek refuge with host communities -- is often ignored," International Committee of the Red Cross chief Jakob Kellenberger said.
For drone freaks (and these days Washington seems full of them), here's
the good news: Drones are hot! Not long ago -- 2006 to be exact -- the
Air Force could barely get a few armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
in the air at once; now, the number is 38; by 2011, it will reputedly be 50, and beyond that, in every sense, the sky's the limit.
I have been to the Gaza Strip twice
and southern Israel once since the 2008-09 war, where I had the opportunity
to listen to accounts from both people about what had happened to them
during that time. Israelis showed me thickly walled rooms that act as
bomb shelters and explained air raid siren systems in Sderot and Ashqelon.
As difficult as their situation was, nothing could have prepared me
for the level of destruction I found in Gaza.
In a stunning
blow against international law and human rights, the U.S. House of
Representatives overwhelmingly approved a resolution on Tuesday
attacking the report
of the United Nations Human Rights Council's fact-finding mission on
the Gaza conflict.
Shame on the House of Representatives, and on the Democratic
leadership of the House, for pushing through a resolution once again
blindly taking the side of Israeli aggression.
I’m referring to the vote on Tuesday, by a lopsided 344-to-36 margin, to condemn the Goldstone report on Gaza.
Last winter, a remote Texas prison convulsed in a cry of outrage, voicing the desperation of the immigration system’s silenced captives.
