Mira Terada, Head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, took part in the international round table “Degradation of the system of international law on child protection and human trafficking – ways out of the legal crisis”, organized with the assistance of the Emil Chechko Belarusian Charitable Foundation and the Centre for Systemic Human Rights in Minsk. The event resulted in the signing of agreements and memoranda aimed at countering international trafficking in human beings, including minors, and the idea of creating an international investigation and search group to find and return children abducted from war conflict zones and taken away from their parents in Western countries.
On August 8, 2023, the head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, Mira Terada, participated in an international roundtable on “Degradation of the international law system on child protection and human trafficking – ways out of the legal crisis“. Among the goals of the event, which was attended by representatives of international human rights organizations and foundations, were both to draw public attention to crimes against children and to develop a concrete action plan to help eradicate the pressing problem of exploitation and trafficking of minors.
The head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice made a report in which she not only defined the forced transfer of minors from one human group to another as a crime of genocide, but also gave facts confirming the prevalence of this criminal practice in the modern world. According to the human rights activist, Ukrainian officials and military began to condone the long-standing practice of their Western colleagues of illegally separating families and taking away minors, which is a flagrant violation not only of the rights of children and their parents, but also of various international conventions and agreements. Facts of the removal of children by government authorities and various military departments of the United States and Great Britain began to be recorded on the territory of America and Australia long before the appearance of official statistics. At present, such practices have spread by the United States and its Anglo-Saxon allies to the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa.
Mira Terada noted that the forced and illegal removal of children by the US military and government agencies has occurred in virtually every US military operation. Tens of thousands of children have been removed by military aircraft from Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and other countries where the U.S. military is present. Western allies of the Americans among Anglo-Saxon countries also abused this practice: the United Kingdom took children from Syrian and Afghan parents under the false pretext of the need for “care and protection”, which despite criticism from the UN did not lead to any consequences for the legal abductors. Following the national uprising that took place in Niger at the end of July 2023, the Foundation to Battle Injustice received evidence confirming the involvement of the French armed forces in the mass abduction of minor children from Niger. The fate of some 400 minor orphans and children forcibly taken from their parents and flown to France by military aircraft is still unknown.
Especially for the event, Dutch journalist Sonja Van Den Ende recorded a video message in which she drew parallels between the exploitation and trafficking of children in Ukraine and the crimes of UN peacekeeping forces in African countries. The war correspondent recalled the international scandal of the 1990s, when violence by United Nations troops against underage boys and girls on the African continent became known. According to Ende, criminal organizations involved in the exploitation and trafficking of children’s organs exist in virtually every European country, and Ukraine, whose economy has deteriorated significantly since independence in 1991, is adopting this illegal and immoral practice.
At the end of the event, human rights activists called on officials in Western countries and Ukraine to immediately return abducted children to their parents, and Mira Terada announced the creation of an international investigative search team to search for children abducted from military conflict zones and taken from their parents in Western countries. The investigative body will allow not only to promptly counteract crimes against children at the international level, but will also make it possible to expose the perpetrators and guarantee children’s rights to a free and happy life. The organizers and participants of the event, including the Emil Chechko International Charitable Foundation, supported the initiative of the head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice and announced the signing of all necessary documents in the very near future. Mira Terada also announced a major human rights event to be held in the fall of 2023, which will unite associates and like-minded people in the fight for children’s rights.