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Для цитирования: Коннова В.И., Гордеева К.С. АКТУАЛЬНЫЕ ПРОБЛЕМЫ ЗАЩИТЫ И ОХРАНЫ ПРАВ ДЕТЕЙ В ДЕМОКРАТИЧЕСКОЙ РЕСПУБЛИКЕ КОНГО = CURRENT PROBLEMS OF PROTECTION AND KEEPING OF CHILDREN'S RIGHTS IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO / Науч. рук. к.ф.н, доцент Э.Р. Айвазов, доцент кафедры иностранных языков Крымского филиала ФГБОУВО «РГУП» // Океанский менеджмент. - 2024. - № 1С(23). - С.72-75.
Коннова В.И.,
студентки 2 курса бакалавриата Крымского филиала ФГБОУВО «РГУП»
Гордеева КС.,
студентки 2 курса бакалавриата Крымского филиала ФГБОУВО «РГУП»
Научный руководитель: Айвазова Э.Р., доцент кафедры иностранных языков Крымского филиала ФГБОУВО «РГУП», к.ф.н., доцент
АКТУАЛЬНЫЕ ПРОБЛЕМЫ ЗАЩИТЫ И ОХРАНЫ ПРАВ ДЕТЕЙ В ДЕМОКРАТИЧЕСКОЙ
РЕСПУБЛИКЕ КОНГО
Аннотация: В статье рассматриваются грубые и серьезные нарушения прав и свобод граждан, в том числе детей, в Демократической Республике Конго, основные причины сложившейся ситуации, статистика нарушений и преступлений, аспекты защиты прав детей в условиях вооруженных конфликтов, проводится анализ национального законодательства и международных актов. Изучаются пути преодоления правонарушений, в том числе с использованием экономических методов воздействия на социальную сферу жизни населения.
Ключевые слова: Демократическая Республика Конго, права детей, геноцид в Руанде, вооруженный конфликт, миротворческие силы ООН, «принуждение» к миру, национальное законодательство, социальная реформа.
CURRENT PROBLEMS OF PROTECTION AND KEEPING OF CHILDREN'S RIGHTS IN THE
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
Abstract: The article examines gross and serious violations of the rights and freedoms of citizens, including children, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the main causes of the current situation, statistics of violations and crimes, aspects of the protection of children's rights in armed conflicts, analyzes national legislation and international acts. Ways of overcoming offenses are being studied, including using economic methods of influencing the social sphere of the population.
Keywords: Democratic Republic of the Congo, children's rights, Genocide in Rwanda, armed conflict, UN peacekeeping force, «compulsion» to peace, national legislation, social reform.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (next - DRC) is one of the largest countries in Africa by area, according to the latest study, it ranks 14th in the world by population. It is one of the poorest countries in the world. According to UN reports, gross and serious violations of the rights and freedoms of citizens, including children, are taking place in the country. There are armed conflicts in the country, which only contribute to an increase in the number of these violations.
The relevance of the study lies in the fact that in the Congo, despite the leading positions in territorial and numerical equivalent, there are terrible violations of children's rights, which is undoubtedly unacceptable in the modern world. By revealing this problem, we make public events affecting not only the situation in a remote African country, but also the entire modern world community.
The purpose of this article is to investigate the events that led to violations of children's rights, as well as to analyze why, over the course of several decades, none of the tactics proposed by the world community to eliminate violations of children's rights has yielded results.
The specific objectives of the study are: 1. Get acquainted with the situation of the inhabitants of the Congo. 2. To study the course of events that led to the current violations. 3. Consider possible solutions to problems.
By the end of the Second World War, a new social stratum began to form in the Congo - the évolué -Africans who adopted European values and behaviors. Until the 60s of the twentieth century, the évolué, dissatisfied with social inequality, racial discrimination, and a small amount of privileges and opportunities, became increasingly hostile to the colonial authorities and sought autonomy for the regions of the Congo, which gradually led to a wave of organized strikes throughout the country.
On June 30, 1960, the country gained independence. The next 30 years passed relatively quietly and quietly, under the rule of the greedy Sese Seko Mobutu, until he was overthrown: after 32 years in power, he left the country with a ruined economy, a debt of 14.5 billions of dollars, a corrupt political system and inflation of 9.800 %.
By this time, the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda was already raging, where 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus were killed in 100 days. An army of exiled Tutsis drove the Hutus into the Congo. The flames of war spread to neighboring countries: Zimbabwe, Burundi, Uganda and Angola joined the conflict, the main goal of which gradually became the seizure of minerals and the robbery of the local population. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an area comparable to the territory of Western Europe, ethnic contradictions, a thirst for power and a desire to seize natural resources have merged, in which more than 70 armed groups are involved.
This is how a witness describes one of the episodes of the First African War: "In the chocolate waters of the Congo river, a mutilated corpse rolls by. The rebels' "minister for children" shivers. How is he going to explain this to the horrified UN peace envoys from the capital, Kinshasa, who are at that moment stepping on to the quay to meet him? Not by telling the truth, obviously, which was that his rebel group had slaughtered 150 people in the town of Kisangani on May 14th-15th, then pitched their disembowelled bodies into the river with stones crammed into their bellies. Instead, he smiles, accepts the envoys' offerings of food aid, and talks chummily of other things" [2].
All the problems in the field of human and child protection in the DRC are not without the attention of international organizations, primarily the UN and the Security Council. UN experts constantly visit the eastern regions of the country in order to get acquainted with the situation on the ground, and the UN Stabilization Mission in the DRC conducts patrols in the hotbeds of conflict, but the situation practically does not change. Local conflicts in the border zones with Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi continue, and the 111 million population (estimated 2023) of the DRC is still below the poverty line and continues to bear the catastrophic consequences of military operations on its shoulders.
From January 2018 to March 2020, overall number of grave violations: 9,957 grave violations. Recruitment and Use: 7,456 children. Killing and Maiming: 391 children (182 killed, 209 maimed). Rape and Other Forms of Sexual Violence: 763 children. Attacks on Schools and Hospitals: 135 attacks (110 schools, 25 hospitals). Abduction: 1,201 children [8]. Denial of humanitarian access: 11 incidents. In January 2018, half a million children were found to be malnourished [9].
In 2003, Sinafasi Makelo who represented the Mbuti Pygmies living in North Kivu, told the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues that during the war, members of his people were hunted and eaten, including children.
In May 2004, a certificate of official discharge of children from military service began to be applied. But at the same time real statistics (for 2020-2023) show that despite the signed certificate the recruitment and use of children in armed conflicts is still happening about 2 thousand children are now participating in armed operations.
So far, about 500 children have been killed or maimed in military conflicts, more than a thousand children have been kidnapped, 69 schools and 44 hospitals have been attacked, 600 children have been sexually abused, and about 9 children have been denied humanitarian access.
Figures highlighted also that the main perpetrators of the killing and maiming of children, attacks on schools and hospitals, and the denial of humanitarian access were the armed and security forces of Governments. Governments whose primary responsibility is to ensure the protection of civilians and civilian infrastructures [7].
The main reasons for these violations are:
1. Staggeringly high number of violations against children, particularly those committed by armed groups, and amid rising intercommunal violence, hate speech and attacks on civilians.
2. Increase in the number of violations by government forces, particularly the killing and maiming of children and attacks on schools and hospitals, mostly in Ituri and North Kivu Provinces.
At the same time, some progress has been made, which allows to reduce the number of violations every year. The UN sees this progress in the continued commitment of the government to maintain the progress made in preventing the recruitment and use of children, including through verification mechanisms, efforts to hold accountable those responsible for serious violations, including cases of recruitment and use of children, and for incidents of sexual violence, as well as the signing of unilateral commitments to protect children by six commanders after the support of the United Nations and the release of 430 children.
Ways to overcome violations of rights are the main directions of state policy designed to reduce the level of problem areas both at the legislative and socio-economic levels, in order to fully ensure the implementation, protection and protection of children's rights.
Such ways can be considered:
1. Reducing the degree of influence of armed conflicts on the life of society, in the future - the complete cessation of armed conflicts on the territory of the Congo.
The protection of the rights of the child during armed conflicts is one of the priorities of international law. There are not only personal sanctions for violations of children's rights, but also public censure of States by the international community. For a complete cessation of hostilities, special conditions are necessary, which even the pacifist-minded Government of the DRC does not currently have.
The position of the DRC on this issue converges to the need for "peace enforcement" - actions taken to end an interstate or intrastate-armed conflict by a group of States not involved in it. UN peacekeeping operations can serve as such "coercion".
UN peacekeeping forces first entered the territory of the DRC in July 1999, since then they have remained there to this day. Following the signing of the Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement in July 1999 between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and five regional States in July 1999, the Security Council established the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC) by its resolution 1279 PDF Document of 30 November 1999, initially to plan for the observation of the ceasefire and disengagement of forces and maintain liaison with all parties to the Ceasefire Agreement.
Later in a series of resolutions, the Council expanded the mandate of MONUC to the supervision of the implementation of the Ceasefire Agreement and assigned multiple related additional tasks. In accordance with Security Council resolution 1925 PDF Document of 28 May 2010, MONUC was renamed as of 1 July the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) to reflect the new phase reached in the country. The new mission has been authorized to use all necessary means to carry out its mandate relating, among other things, to the protection of civilians, humanitarian personnel and human rights defenders under imminent threat of physical violence and to support the Government of the DRC in its stabilization and peace consolidation efforts [5].
2. Stabilization of the state economy.
A stable and developed economy is a prerequisite for improving the standard of living of the population. The DRC is one of the wealthiest countries in terms of untapped resource wealth and has an estimated 24 trillion dollars in untapped mineral deposits, including the world's largest reserves of coltan (where elements niobium and tantalum are extracted) and significant quantities of the world's cobalt, lithium, copper, diamonds, tin and gold.
Based on the available data, the main mining companies in the DRC to date are: Glencore International AG (a Swiss trading company, one of the world's largest suppliers of raw materials and rare earths), CMOC Group Limited (a Chinese company that is one of the largest producers of molybdenum and tungsten in the world, the second largest-producer of cobalt and niobium), Randgold Resources (a gold mining business registered on the Channel Islands), Zijin Mining Group (a Chinese mining and metallurgical company, specializing in the extraction and processing of copper, gold, silver, zinc, lead and lithium) and Ivanhoe Mines Ltd. (a Canadian mining company focused on developing new mines at the Kamoa-Kakula copper deposit in the DRC). Thus, there is not a single domestic mining company among the six largest companies. The UN Security Council has repeatedly held meetings on issues related to the illegal exploitation of natural resources and other riches of the DRC, due to which companies whose activities were recognized as illegal were prohibited from conducting extractive industries on the territory of the DRC (some companies were even recognized as terrorist -The Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (Forces démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda: FDLR)).
It is also important to note that in 2019, a lawsuit was filed in a Washington court, the plaintiff is a nongovernmental organization International Rights Advocates and 13 anonymous plaintiffs are parents whose children died or were seriously injured during cobalt mining. The lawsuit claims that the cobalt boom "caused a new wave of brutal exploitation" - hundreds of Congolese children were forced due to extreme poverty to work in cobalt mines, passing underground tunnels using primitive equipment for just 2 dollar a day. The lawsuit is directed against two mining companies - Glencore and Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt (a Chinese mining, metallurgical and chemical company, the country's largest supplier of cobalt compounds) [4].
Thus, we are witnessing active interference in the economic extractive sphere of the Congo by foreign organizations that carry out their activities by paying taxes. As you can understand, we cannot even compare this tax with the income that these organizations have from the sale of minerals on foreign stock markets. These companies are the largest suppliers of minerals of Congolese origin. However, why do we not see organizations registered in the Congo among the largest companies? The Congo industry does not allow mining and processing of minerals in such volumes as interested companies; the Congo is not a subject of trade in any of the major stock markets.
Based on the above, we dare to propose a solution consisting in raising the tax on mining in the DRC -this idea has been raised more than once in the government of the DRC, but has not been implemented (the most common reason in the media is the threat of companies to suspend operations in the DRC, which is not only why it will fall income to the state budget, but there will also be a major loss of jobs, which will lead to a deterioration of the state's economy). But in order to circumvent this system of tricks, we propose to consider the possibility of raising the tax rate for companies that are not among the ten largest in the extraction and sale of minerals. An increase in the rate by 5-10 % will not lead to the closure of mines, since the tax increase will be insignificant for companies with small-scale production, but will make a valuable contribution to the state budget. It is also possible to set the limit of the tax increase in a specific volume of production turnover, so by changing the object of taxation, with proper planning, you can change the income.
The economic component of the State is extremely important for ensuring the social function of the State, which, in turn, is the reason for resolving violations of children's rights in the Congo.
3. Stimulating the social sphere of society.
In the DRC, the need for a major social reform directly related to the implementation and protection of children's rights is due to gross violations of the policy in this area. We see an urgent need to increase the guaranteed minimum wage, expand the list of benefits for large families, build schools and medical institutions, as well as change legislation in the social sphere. Social reform has already begun in the country, but it is very complicated by the difficult situation in the north-east of the country, because in order to effectively stimulate the social sphere, first of all, it is necessary to resolve the military conflict and reform the extractive sector of the economy to increase the revenue side of the country's budget. Therefore, until these measures are taken, we cannot talk about building a socially-oriented state.
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