Janna Jihad is a teenage girl who has grown up in the Palestinian village of Nabi Salih, located north of Ramallah city in the West Bank. It is part of Palestinian territory that has been under Israel’s military occupation since 1967.

Janna, and Palestinian children like her, are denied their rights and face discrimination on a daily basis. The Israeli army regularly arrests children from Janna’s village, often during raids on their homes in the middle of the night while families are asleep. Children struggle to access their rights to education and freedom of movement because of barriers and checkpoints which force delays on any journey. It can take hours to get to school instead of a few minutes. People find it hard to travel for work and to earn a living to support their families. For anyone who is sick, it can be nearly impossible to get to a hospital.

In 2009, when Janna was three, her community used their right to peaceful protest and began weekly demonstrations. But they were met with violence. When she was seven, Janna’s uncle and her friend were killed by the Israeli military. Janna used her mother’s phone to record what was happening and reveal the truth. By the time she was a teenager, her live videos were being watched by hundreds of thousands of people around the world. In 2018, Janna became the youngest press card-carrying journalist in the world, at the age of 12. Yet she has faced many threats for her work.

I started journalism at the age of seven because I wanted the whole world to know what is happening here and how we live in fear and uncertainty. I want a normal life, a normal childhood.

Janna Jihad

KHAIRIYAH RAHMANYAH, THAILAND

Khairiyah Rahmanyah was born to a fishing family in southern Thailand. The sea near her home is a rich source of seafood and home to endangered marine species, such as sea turtles and rare pink dolphins. In 2020, when she was 17, Khairiyah launched a campaign against the Thai government’s plan to develop land on which her village in Chana is located, into an industrial estate. She spent hours picketing and travelled 1,000 kilometres to Government House in Bangkok to deliver a letter to the prime minister begging him to stop the development. As a result, the government decided to postpone its decision.

Khairiyah said: “I am really proud to be representing the stories of my community. I was born into activism and I have been fighting to protect my community since I was little. It has been painful to live this reality and I want life to be different for the next generation. As children, we must be allowed to learn about our rights and it’s up to adults to encourage, empower and support us.”.

As children, we must be allowed to learn about our rights and it’s up to adults to encourage, empower and support us.

Khairiyah Rahmanyah

YEZIDI CHILDREN IN IRAQ

Article 39 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) asks governments to ‘take all appropriate measures to promote physical and psychological recovery and social reintegration of a child victim of: any form of neglect, exploitation, or abuse; torture or any other form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; or armed conflicts’.

The plight of Iraq’s Yezidi children highlights the importance of this article. Between 2014 and 2017, the armed group calling itself the Islamic State (IS) committed war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Yezidi community in Iraq. Yezidi children were kidnapped and enslaved, tortured, forced to fight, raped and subjected to other horrific human rights violations. Thousands of children were killed or abducted.

Even though hundreds of others survived and returned to their families in Iraq, their homecoming did not mark the end of their suffering. These child survivors went on to face significant physical and mental health challenges which Amnesty International documented in a report published in July 2020, yet they received no assistance. Yezidi boys, who had been forced to fight by their captors, were often isolated by their own communities on their return. Yezidi women and girls who gave birth to children as a result of sexual enslavement by IS were often driven, coerced or even deceived into separating from their children due to religious and societal pressures.

As part of its advocacy efforts, Amnesty International called for a draft survivors law to be expanded to include children as beneficiaries of any reparations scheme. On 1 March 2021, Iraq’s parliament passed the Yezidi Female Survivors Law, which provides the framework for reparations and assistance to survivors of ISIS captivity – including child survivors – with the aim of getting them the support they are entitled to.

IMPACT OF CONFLICT ON CHILDREN IN NORTHEAST NIGERIA

The conflict in Northeast Nigeria has had a devastating effect on children, as documented in Amnesty International’s report, ‘We Dried Our Tears’.

Boko Haram has abducted hundreds of girls and boys and subjected them to further atrocities in captivity. The group has also wreaked havoc on communities across the region, pillaging villages and attacking civilians and schools.

Rather than protecting children fleeing Boko Haram areas, the Nigerian military has often unlawfully detained them for months or years and subjected them to torture and other ill-treatment. Amnesty International has also shown how the government has failed to ensure that displaced children have access to an adequate education.