Impact on children of illicit exploitation of natural resources in conflict zones

The illicit exploitation of natural resources in zones of conflict, has a direct and significant bearing on children. They are exploited as cheap labour and forced to work in unhealthy and dangerous conditions with devastating consequences for their future. This practice of plunder is robbing children of their birthright to education, healthcare and development. Moreover, this has become a principal means of fuelling and prolonging conflicts in which children suffer the most.

Closely related to the grey area in which criminality and politically motivated action intersect is the phenomenon of asset or resource wars, where conflict often revolves around the control of territory or the State apparatus as a direct means of commanding natural resources such as oil, diamonds, gold, coltan, timber or cocoa. Empirical evidence indicates that in these asset wars there are often a multiplicity of actors vying for a stake, from government-armed forces and armed groups opposed to the State, to international interests such as other States, multinational corporations and criminal cartels. There is often also close interlinkage with other lucrative and mainly illicit trade such as in weapons and drugs, which serves to fuel and prolong conflict. Beyond conscription as soldiers and other categories of grave violations, children may also be forced to labour in mining activities or be exposed to criminal networks engaged in child trafficking.

Asset wars have given rise to complex war economies and have frequently internationalized armed conflict. As a result, the international community faces a considerable challenge to respond, including through targeted measures. Sanctions regimes and other measures must be increasingly sophisticated and multifaceted to affect those who wage, fuel and otherwise benefit from conflict. Higher standards of corporate responsibility of those enterprises and industries that benefit from illicit trade of natural resources are also required.

Actions by the Security Council, which have included the application and monitoring of sanctions in Angola, Sierra Leone and Liberia, and mandated investigations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Liberia, have made a notable impact. The application of further targeted measures by the Security Council would reinforce their impact.

The independent panels of experts established by the Security Council to investigate violations of these sanctions found that diamonds played a uniquely important role in perpetuating the conflict in Angola, and discovered in Liberia and Sierra Leone a strong link between the continued trading in conflict diamonds and trafficking in small arms by both the Government and the rebel groups.