As the armed conflict among the USA, Israel, and the Islamic Republic of Iran grows ever more complex and violent, Yemen is being increasingly drawn into the conflict.
The Houthis, allied with the Islamic Republic of Iran, can menace shipping through the Bab Al-Mandab at the entry of the Red Sea, with a result of a strong increase in in the price of oil and a renewal of hostility with Saudi Arabia. The Houthis control the capital city, Sanaa, while the former government controls much of south Yemen.
The Houthis have used child soldiers since the start of their quest for power in 2014, including an all-women brigade of young women, the Zainabiyat. The governmental forces have also used child soldiers.
As tensions increase, there are signs of a large recruitment of child soldiers by both the Houthis and governmental forces.
The Association of World Citizens which has Consultative Status with the United Nations played an active role in the drafting of the Convention on the Rights of the Child banning the use of child soldiers. Today, there must be a renewed effort to negotiate the broader armed conflict and to prevent the use of child soldiers.
Prof. René Wadlow is President of the Association of World Citizens.
The Association of World Citizens (AWC) has worked actively in the United Nations (UN) human rights bodies against the use of child soldiers in armed conflicts. The Association has also made direct Appeals to governments and militias that use child soldiers.
During the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1985) tens of thousands of Iranian youth, tied into groups to prevent their escape, threw themselves onto barbed wire or walked straight into Iraqi mine fields and faced machine gun fire. In at least twenty-one armed conflicts in different parts of the world, child soldiers have been used.
February 12 has been set by the UN General Assembly as the International Day Against the Use of Child Soldiers. Thus, the Association of World Citizens along with the International Crisis Group with its headquarters in Belgium focused on the use of youth by militias, often involved in the drug trade, in Colombia where youth are forced into militias. There had been in 2016 a ceasefire agreement between the government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the largest of the armed groups active in the country. This agreement has led many of those in the FARC ranks to be integrated into civil society. However, smaller armed groups have continued to be active. They are often involved in the drug trade as a way to finance their activities.
Thus, strong social action is needed, especially in those parts of the country inhabited by indigenous populations. Events in Venezuela also have an impact on Colombia and thus merit watching closely.
Prof. René Wadlow is President of the Association of World Citizens.
The recent armed conflicts in Darfur, Sudan, the Gaza Strip, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo have highlighted the fate of children caught in such armed conflicts. In addition to the children deliberately massacred or caught in the crossfire, many more have been deprived of their physical, mental, and emotional needs by the armed conflict. Children can be specifically targeted in strategies to eliminate the next generation. Children, especially girls, have been made the targets of sexual abuse and gender-based violence.
This brutal reality has been exacerbated by the changes in the nature of armed conflicts. Today’s conflicts are often internal, fought by multiple semi-autonomous armed groups within existing State boundaries. The international law of war governing Inter-State conflicts fought by regular armies is routinely ignored. Often the village has become the battlefield and the civilian population the primary victim.
Displaced children in North Kivu, 2007 (C) Julien Harneis
At the heart of this social disintegration is a crisis of values. Perhaps the most fundamental loss a society can suffer is the collapse of its value system. Many societies exposed to protracted armed conflicts have seen their community values radically undermined or shattered altogether. This loss has given rise to an ethical vacuum, a setting in which international standards are ignored with impunity and where local value systems have dissolved.
The world society has an obligation to focus attention on the plight of children. The Association of World Citizens (AWC) has worked to raise greater governmental and public awareness of the need for protection of children in times of armed conflict. The Convention on the Rights of the Child calls for the protection of children’s right to life, education, health, and other fundamental needs. Thus, the international standards are in place. Our task is to see that they are put into practice. Positive action is needed. This is a policy goal for 2026 of the AWC.
Prof. René Wadlow is President of the Association of World Citizens.
On March 6, 2025, the United Nations (UN) Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned that many children in the conflicts among militias in Sudan are at risk of rape and other forms of sexual violence which are being used as weapons of war. In November 2024, the Association of World Citizens (AWC) had highlighted that rape was being used as a weapon of war in the Sudan conflicts and that strong counter measures are needed.
“There are numerous types of rape. Rape is committed to boast the soldiers’ morale, to feed soldiers’ hatred of the enemy, their sense of superiority, and to keep them fighting; rape is one kind of war booty; women are raped because war intensifies men’s sense of entitlement, superiority, avidity and social license to rape; rape is a weapon of war used to spread political terror; rape can destabilize a society and break its resistance; rape is a form of torture; gang rapes in public terrorize and silence women and force them to flee homes, families and communities; rape targets women because they keep the civilian population functioning and are essential to its social and physical continuity; rape is used in ethnic cleansing; it is designed to drive women from their homes or destroy the possibility of reproduction; genocidal rape treats women as reproductive vessels to make them bear babies of the rapists’ nationality, ethnicity, race or religion, and genocidal rape aggravates women’s terror and future stigma, producing a class of outcast mothers and children – this is rape committed with consciousness of how unacceptable a raped woman is to the patriarchal community and to herself. This list combines individual and group motives with obedience to military command; in doing so, it gives a political context to violence against women, and it is this political context that needs to be incorporated in the social response to rape.”
The AWC first raised the issue of rape as a weapon of war in the UN Commission on Human Rights in March 2001 after the judgement of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) maintained that there can be no time limitation on bringing an accused to trial. The Tribunal also reinforced the possibility of universal jurisdiction – that a person can be tried not only by his national court but by any court claiming universal jurisdiction and where the accused is present.
As Citizens of the World, we need to have a peace-building approach which asks: How does a political conflict degenerate into pervasive mass violence, generating new crises and new forms of violent conflict in the future? Even after a war ends, the effects of sexual violence continue in the form of unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections, discrimination and ostracizing of victims and often lasting psychological damage. Thus, we must ask how a community pulls itself out from the cycle of violence and creates new attitudes to promote human dignity and develop new institutions of conflict resolution.
Prof. René Wadlow is President of the Association of World Citizens.
“Is not this what I require of you … to snap every yoke and set free those who have been crushed?”
Isaiah, 58 v 6
There are many ways that we are held in chains as individuals through our own desires and habits. There are also many ways that society keeps others in chains. Our task is to help snap the individual bonds of slavery through our efforts at self-liberation and self-realization. To break the chains that society creates, we must work together cooperatively.
Slavery today, as in the past, can have one or more of the following characteristics: A slave is forced to work though mental or physical threat. The person is owned or controlled by an “employer” usually through mental or physical abuse and threats. The person is dehumanized by being treated as a commodity and bought and sold as if property. There are also restrictions placed on a person’s freedom of movement and kept isolated from those who might help to break the chains.
(C) Bernard J. Henry/AWC
Women are often the victims of diverse forms of servitude, and International Women’s Day is an appropriate time to analyze patterns and our efforts to liberate. Here we can look at four categories through there are often links among them.
A first category is debt bondage, especially practiced in South Asia. It is estimated that there are some 20 million people held in debt bondage throughout the world, even though debt bondage is forbidden by the Supplementary Convention of 1956 on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery. Debt bondage is largely a rural practice, and local government officials and police often overlook its consequences. The debt is usually contracted in an emergency such as sickness or to cover expenses between harvests. However, often the person making the debt from money lenders or richer farmers cannot read and, therefore, has no idea of what “rates of interest” means, nor do they know when they have worked off the debt. It is often a child or younger member of the family who is “given” to work to pay off the debt. The debt is often never considered to have been paid and will go from one generation to the next.
Child labor is a second and related category of contemporary slavery. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that there are some 180 million youth aged between 5 and 17 years old who are in the worst forms of child labor – work that is hazardous to their mental and physical health. The ILO Convention of 1999 (N° 182) is devoted to the “Worst Forms of Child Labor.” Translating these ILO efforts to the local workplace is a large job and needs to be done with care as some families depend heavily on income from children’s work.
Early and forced marriage is a third category of contemporary slavery. This form is often overlooked or excused as “custom” for it is usually carried out by the families themselves. In many societies, marriage is an alliance between families with elements of social control over wealth, power, and the sexuality of women as the motive. Women and girls are married without choice and often forced into lives of servitude. Because the girl child is seen in some communities as having lower priority, she is often denied access to such basic necessities as education which could ultimately protect her from exploitation.
A fourth category is human trafficking, often linked to prostitution which is the fastest-growing means by which people are enslaved today. Women, children and men are coerced and deceived by traffickers who promise work and good pay in areas far from their family and community. The reality is usually a harsh contrast. People are forced through the threat and use of violence to work against their will. Trafficking in persons is often carried out by groups which also traffic guns, drugs and pornography. These groups are willing to kill to keep their trade growing and often corrupt local officials and police.
Thus, on this International Women’s Day, we need to evaluate closely the challenges which face us within global society and to set out clearly the steps which must be undertaken for equality and justice.
The conquest of the city of Goma, North-Kivu, a city of two million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo in November-December 2024, followed by the conquest by the same forces of Bukavu, the capital of South-Kivu in January-February 2025, a city of one million persons, has brought to attention the use of “child soldiers”, very young people mobilized to kill and destroy. The armed forces, the regular Army of the Democratic Republic of Congo, not having been paid in some time, faded away and left the fighting largely to militias organized along clanic or ethnic lines. There are real possibilities that the fighting will spread to Rwanda and Burundi, perhaps even Uganda.
The issue of child soldiers had gained attention in the ethnic-based fighting in Liberia. Young people had also been used in fighting in Colombia, South America. Child soldiers were often accused of sexual abuse, and there were difficulties in reintegrating the youth in their home villages when the fighting stopped.
Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) active in Geneva in the United Nations’ (UN’s) human rights bodies felt that action was needed on the issue of child soldiers and began to organize on the issue. In practice, what gives NGOs their influence is not what an individual NGO can do alone but what they can do collectively. “Networking” is a key method of progress. NGOs make networks which facilitate the trans-national movement of norms and information. Such networks tend to be temporary and highly personalized. However, at the UN, they are bound together in a common desire to protect the planet and advance the welfare of humanity.
In 1979 a Special Working Group on the Rights of the Child was created under the chairmanship of the Polish representative, the legal specialist Adam Lopatka. Government and NGO representatives worked together from 1979 to 1988 for one week each year in Geneva. There was a core group, including the Association of World Citizens (AWC), which worked steadily together. Representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the International Labor Organization were brought into the sessions.
The Working Group managed to come to a consensus on a final version in time for the UN General Assembly to adopt the Convention on the Rights of the Child on November 20, 1989. By creating a common legal framework of world law, the Convention on the Rights of the Child has increased levels of government accountability, bringing about legislative and institutional reforms and increasing international cooperation. As James P. Grant, then UNICEF’s Executive Director, said at the time, “Transcending its detailed provisions, the Convention on the Rights of the Child embodies the fundamental principle that the lives and the normal development of children should have first call on society’s concerns and capacities and that children should be able to depend upon that commitment in good times and bad, in normal times and in times of emergency, in times of peace and in times of war, in times of prosperity and in times of recession.”
The Convention of the Rights of the Child has an important provision banning the recruitment and use in hostilities of persons under 15 years of age. The same provision has been placed in the Rome Statute creating the International Criminal Court. These international legal standards are tools which can be used. It is difficult to reach out to the armed militias active in Congo. However, we must try, as Citizens of the World, to make world law known and put into practice.
Prof. René Wadlow is President of the Association of World Citizens.
WORLD CITIZENS CALLON THE AUTHORITIES OF IRAQ TO WITHDRAW THEIR DRAFT LAW ALLOWING THE MARRIAGE OF 9-YEAR-OLD GIRLS
The AWC is alarmed to hear that a draft law under consideration in Iraq may make it legal for a man to marry a girl as young as nine.
We hear many individuals and civil society groups in the country have rightly spoken out about the said draft law.
We firmly believe the Iraqi authorities should by no means make it the law of the land.
For seventy years, Iraqi law has considered the “full age” for marriage, in the very words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to be eighteen. That is consistent with the Convention on the Rights of Child under whose Article 1 “a child means every human being below the age of eighteen years”.
Lowering the marriageable age for girls to nine would send a disastrous signal for girls in Iraq and, in a broader manner, throughout the entire Arab and Muslim world and, ultimately, throughout the entire world, beyond the borders of states, cultures, languages, religions, ethnic groups or of any other nature. It would mean the end of the very notion of child abuse.
Since the draft law would make it possible for a man to marry a young girl but not, conversely, for a woman to marry a young boy – and, even then, it would only be equally condemnable – the draft law also sends a discriminatory message toward women, signifying that a female life is of lesser value.
The AWC condemns in the strongest terms any legislative attempt, whether in Iraq or anywhere else for this purpose, to turn a child into a person’s property, let alone their sexual object of pleasure.
We hereby call on the Iraqi Government and Parliament to immediately withdraw the draft bill and ensure that Iraqi law remains steadily consistent with UN human rights standards.
When the Convention on the Rights of the Child was unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on November 20, 1989, governments took a major step forward in establishing a framework of world law to protect the basic dignity and rights of children in all parts of the world. Thus, on 20 November, we remember with gratitude those who worked to develop the concepts and reality of the Rights of the Child but also to measure the tasks that are before us, especially as members of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). This universal framework is based on the principle that each child should have the possibility to develop into an active and responsible member of society. The way in which a society treats its children reflects not only its qualities of compassion and protective caring, but also its sense of justice, its commitment to the future and its urge to better the human condition for continuing generations.
The effort to create a legal framework for the welfare of the child began early in the League of Nations efforts with the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child of 1924 which was largely based on a text written by the then newly established NGO “Save the Children International Union”. Child welfare has always been a prime example of cooperative efforts among governments, scholars highlighting the conditions of children, and NGOs working actively in the field. The Geneva Declaration served as the basis for the UN General Assembly resolution on the Declaration of the Rights of the Child adopted also on November 20, 1959. The 1959 Declaration was followed with more specific provisions of the Declaration on Social and Legal Principles relating to the Protection and Welfare of Children, the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice, and the Declaration on the Protection of Women and Children in Emergency and Armed Conflict.
In 1978, some representatives of both governments and NGOs in the UN human rights circles in Geneva felt that it was time to bring together these different declarations and provisions into a single text that would have the legal force of a UN convention. The Polish delegation to the UN Commission on Human Rights took the lead in this effort, but some governments felt that the different declarations needed to be closely reviewed and measured against changing realities. Thus, a Special Working Group on the Rights of the Child was created in 1979 under the chairmanship of the Polish representative, the legal specialist Adam Lopatka. Government and NGO representatives worked together from 1979 to 1988 for a week each year. There was a core group, including the Association of World Citizens (AWC), which worked steadily and represented a wide range of different beliefs, values and traditions, as well as a wide range of socio-economic realities.
As a result of serious discussions, the Convention covers a wide range of human rights which can be summarized as the three “Ps”: provision, protection, and participation. Each child has the right to be provided with certain things and services, such as a name and a nationality, to health care and education. Each child has a right to be protected from certain acts such as torture, exploitation, arbitrary detention, and unwarranted removal from parental care. Each child has a right to participate in decisions affecting their lives as well as in community life.
The Working Group managed to come to a consensus on the final version in time for the General Assembly to adopt it on November 20, 1989, the anniversary date of the Declaration. The Convention on the Rights of the Child is meant to provide guidance for governments to review national legislation and policies in their child-related initiatives. It is by examining national law and policy and the effectiveness of government structures and mechanisms that progress can be measured. The Convention also provides a framework of goals for the vital activities of NGOs. NGOs work on two lines simultaneously: to remind governments of their obligations through approaches to ministries, elected officials and the media and to undertake their own operational efforts.
To help governments to fulfill their obligations and to review national practices, a Committee on the Rights of the Child was created as called for in article 43 of the Convention. The Committee is composed of 10 independent experts elected for a four-year term by the States which have ratified the Convention. The Committee usually meets three times a year for a month each time in Geneva to review and discuss reports submitted by governments, once every four years. The sessions of the Committee are largely carried out in a non-confrontational dialogue with an emphasis on “unmet needs”. The discussion usually lasts six to nine hours for each country. The Committee members have received information and suggestions from NGOs in advance. The Committee members ask many questions and, based on the government’s responses, make suggestions for improving the promotion and protection of children’s rights in the country.
By creating a common legal framework of world law, the Convention on the Rights of the Child has increased levels of governmental accountability, bringing about legislative and institutional reforms, and increasing international cooperation. As James P. Grant, then UNICEF’s Executive Director, said, “Transcending its detailed provisions, the Convention on the Rights of the Child embodies the fundamental principle that the lives and the normal development of children should have first call on society’s concerns and capacities and that children should be able to depend upon the commitment in good times and in bad, in normal times and in times of emergency, in times of peace and in times of war, in times of prosperity and in times of recession.
(C) UNICEF ROSA
Prof. René Wadlow is President of the Association of World Citizens.
What is an “uncontacted tribe”? Come on, you’ve heard of them. These are native communities living in their traditional forest or island habitat, following their millennia-old, nature-based lifestyle and refusing contact with the outside world. Since Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right candidate for the presidency of Brazil, won the election on October 28, the future of Brazilian uncontacted tribes lies in the balance as Bolsonaro pledged during his campaign to have all these tribes wiped out.
One would assume that an uncontacted tribe is logically a people living in one single place, not a group scattered throughout the world, thus being more appropriately called an “uncontacted diaspora”, although the expression wouldn’t make much sense. If that’s what you think, then, think again.
This world of ours is indeed home to a global uncontacted tribe. The tribe has a name – disabled people. And I happen to be one of them. You may be glad that you’re not.
The Real Wretched of the Earth
If you have the firm belief that you could never live with a single one of your rights being violated or not properly implemented, then, indeed, be glad you’re not of our own. Disabled people, currently one billion people making up 15 per cent of the world’s population,are the largest minority in the world and, indignantly enough, the category of human beings whose rights are the most blatantly ignored and violated.
Poverty hits us hard, as, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), eighty per cent of persons with disabilities live in developing countries and studies by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) show that disability rates are significantly higher among groups with lower educational attainment in OECD member states. Among the world’s poorest people, says the World Bank, 20 percent have some form of disability and their communities view them as the most disadvantaged.
Disability doesn’t even spare women and children. A 2004 survey in Orissa, India, found that virtually all the women and girls with disabilities were beaten at home, 25 per cent of women with intellectual disabilities had been raped and 6 per cent of women with disabilities had been forcibly sterilized. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reports that 30 per cent of street youths are in some way disabled. Mortality for disabled children may be as high as 80 per cent in countries where underage mortality has, overall, decreased below 20 per cent, says the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development, adding that, in some cases, it seems as if children are being “weeded out”. Due to malnutrition, diseases, child labor and other causes, disabled children in developing countries are projected to increase over the next thirty years.
When not faced with ignorance, as the OECD says an average 19 per cent of less educated people have disabilities, compared to 11 per cent among the better educated, we must cope with the consequences of armed conflict and violence. The WHO estimates that, for every child killed in warfare, three are injured and left with a permanent form of disability. In some countries, up to a quarter of disabilities result from injuries and violence.
While local uncontacted tribes strive to keep away from “civilization”, we, the global uncontacted tribe, try to fit in but get pushed back by everyone, everywhere. Being a global tribe, the issues we face can rightly be called global issues. But seldom are found global solutions, let alone sought to begin with.
A Global People with No Global Rights
It wasn’t until 2006 that a billion inhabitants of planet Earth saw their rights formally enshrined in a binding treaty – the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, signed on March 30, 2007. The Convention came into force on May 3, 2008 and, to date, 177 countries are States Parties. A specifically-dedicated United Nations (UN) agency, UN Enable, is tasked to ensure that the Convention is respected and enforced throughout the world. And even obtaining that didn’t come easy.
In 2004, the U. S. Administration, then led by President George W. Bush and at odds with much of the world over the Iraq war, opposed the Convention with all its might and argued that national laws within individual countries would always be better than a world treaty. Save that only 45 countries have anti-discrimination and other disability-specific laws, whose background varies heavily from country to country and makes it impossible to have a common global pattern of law emerge from domestic legislation.
In the U. S., disabled people were part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, which landed them laws granting formal rights binding on federal, state, and local government and courts. By contrast, in France, disabled people started to gain specific rights after World War I, when so many veterans returned from the battlefield with injuries for life, needing either specific welfare pensions or assistance in finding a job. In the latter case, French disabled people had to wait until 1975 for a broader law, which was itself succeeded only in 2005 by a more thorough law, in both instances thanks to the determination of one man – Jacques Chirac, who was Prime Minister in 1975 and President in 2005, and whose daughter Laurence, who died in 2016, was gravely disabled. France is a State Party to the Convention, while the U. S. is only a signatory.
The Convention does not allow UN Enable to recognize and register persons as disabled people in the absence of a national framework, in the style of UNHCR which registers refugees in those countries without a national asylum agency. A shameful instance of national sovereignty without the limitations that would guarantee the greater good for everyone. Making us, disabled people, even more of a global uncontacted tribe.
We
Are World Citizens – Sometimes World Leaders, Too
Are we doomed to remain forever global outcasts, a global uncontacted tribe as no one wants to contact us, at least without being judgmental and paternalistic toward us? Can we ever fit into society? To borrow a quote from Mark Twain, some of us “did not know it was impossible, so they did it”. And their names may just astound you.
Stephen Hawking, the British theoretical physicist. John Nash, the American mathematician, whose life inspired the movie A Beautiful Mind. Vincent Van Gogh. Ludwig van Beethoven. Frida Kahlo. Tom Cruise. Robin Williams. Stevie Wonder. Ladyhawke, the New Zealand singer and musician who became world famous in 2008 with her worldwide hit Paris is Burning. To name but a few.
Others still made it to top government posts. Joaquin Balaguer, former President of the Dominican Republic. Wolfgang Schaüble, several times a Federal Minister and now Speaker of Germany’s Federal Assembly (Bundestag). Gordon Brown, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. In the United States, Robert Dole, a longtime Senator from Kansas and the Republican presidential candidate in 1996, as well as his recently-deceased fellow Senator and former Republican presidential nominee John McCain of Arizona – and, most importantly, two former Presidents, both Democrats, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, no less.
The latter won four presidential elections, got his country out of a major economic and social crisis, won World War II and created the United Nations – having done all that from a wheelchair. For an uncontacted tribe, we may not be deemed a completely useless portion of the world’s population.
Don’t Look at Our Name – Look at Our Selves
Even the name “disabled people”, coined by the non-disabled to refer to us, seems to have become more than this world can bear. Some are now using the name “differently abled”, at the very risk of stressing how different we are while we need to be recognized for our specificities but also for our similarities to the so-called “able” people. What’s in a name? Too much.
Disabled people need to be considered for what they are – people forced to live with a disability that requires special attention from society, while each of them retains his or her own self, skills and, unlike what our name suggests, abilities.
December 3 was proclaimed International Day of Disabled Persons in 1992, through UN General Assembly Resolution 47/3. Every year, the same question is asked of the people of the world: Why are you so afraid of the global uncontacted tribe? What makes you think they cannot be but a burden to society? Wouldn’t it be better for both you and them if you would only choose a more inclusive lifestyle that creates equal opportunities, regardless of (dis)ability?
And the world continues to wonder. It sees the global uncontacted tribe. It talks to us. But it uses a language we cannot understand, for its words cannot convey our own thoughts. And uncontacted we remain.
If you really want to contact us, just start by realizing that what you call “disability” originates in your own minds. We, the global uncontacted tribe, hold fortunes in knowledge and experience, different from yours. Please let us help you make this world a better place.
Bernard J. Henry is
the External Relations Officer of the Association of World Citizens.
Association of World Citizens 