United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday excluded the Saudi-led coalition from the list of violators of children's rights to conflict, causing severe criticism from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Guterres said - in his annual report to the Security Council - that 1,447 children were killed and maimed in Yemen during the past year due to the war, blaming the Saudi-Emirati coalition for killing and maiming 222 children, and holding the Yemeni government responsible for 96 killing children, in exchange for holding the Houthis responsible for killing 313 children , And the security belt that killed 11 children.
Despite the report, the Secretary-General said that the coalition "will be removed from the list of killing and maiming (children) in the wake of a significant decrease in killing and maiming due to air strikes" and the implementation of measures aimed at protecting children.
Guterres approved a conditional comment for a year to put the Saudi-Emirati coalition on the black list, saying that "any failure" to reduce the number of child victims will lead to its inclusion again next year.
When asked whether the United Nations was under any pressure to remove the Saudi-led coalition from the list, Virginia Gampa, the UN envoy on children and armed conflict, told reporters, "I can respond to that very clearly - not at all."
On the other hand, Amnesty International condemned the move, and said in a tweet on Twitter that what Guterres had done puts the entire mechanism into serious question, noting that "the Secretary-General may have hoped that the media would be busy and not notice this political move with distinction."
Joe Baker, director of Watch for Children's Rights at Watch, also attacked Guterres' decision, and said the decision ignored UN evidence of continued grave violations against children and constituted a new level of shame.
She added that Guterres' deliberate refusal to provide an accurate list of perpetrators defied Security Council resolutions and undermined efforts to protect children in armed conflict.
Baker also said the Secretary-General had failed to include Russian forces in Syria or the US-led forces in Afghanistan or Israeli forces on his list of violators of children's rights, despite hundreds of documented deaths and injuries of children.
The Saudi-led coalition officially included the blacklist in the past three years, and was briefly added to the list in 2016, and former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon excluded him and placed it under review.
At the time, he accused "Ban" of exerting unacceptable and undue pressure after sources revealed that Riyadh had threatened to cut off part of its funding to the United Nations, which Saudi Arabia denied.