Deployment of child protection advisers to United Nations peacekeeping operations

The Department of Peacekeeping Operations, UNICEF and the Special Representative have worked together since 1999 to ensure that peacekeeping operations incorporate children's issues and include child protection advisers. This has expanded capacity to gather information on violations against children and led to the inclusion of child protection in induction training for peacekeepers.

Recognizing the critical role of United Nations peacekeeping missions in protecting children, the Security Council, in its resolutions 1379 (2001), 1460 (2003), 1539 (2004) and 1612 (2005), has endorsed the proposal made by the Special Representative for the systematic assessment of the need, number and role of child protection advisers in preparation of each United Nations peacekeeping mission, and for their deployment to peacekeeping operations, on a case-by-case basis, in order to ensure that children receive special priority in policies, activities and programmes throughout the different phases of peacekeeping and peace consolidation. This includes the provision of training for all mission personnel on child rights and protection, as explicitly requested by the Security Council, as well as systematic reporting on children's concerns in all country-specific reports to the Council. The child protection adviser serves also as a contact-point and interlocutor on issues related to children between peacekeeping operations and United Nations country teams, NGOs working to protect children, national Governments and civil society groups, supporting and complementing work, in particular the work of UNICEF, on the ground.

Embedded child protection expertise has enabled peacekeeping leadership to increasingly ensure that children's considerations are adequately reflected in peace processes. The heads of peacekeeping operations have also been requested to ensure more systematic dialogue with parties to conflict to address grave violations of children's rights. United Nations peacekeeping plays a central role in monitoring and reporting violations, and peacekeepers are receiving more systematic training on child protection.

Since the deployment in 2001 of the first child protection adviser to the peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone, advisers have been included in peacekeeping operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Liberia, Burundi, Côte d'Ivoire, the Sudan and Haiti.