Sudan sentenced children to die over rebel raid -UN

A Sudanese government official said he could not comment on  the case but added child executions were not allowed under the  law and there were checks to keep youngsters off death row.

“We have six from the attack on death row,” said Radhika  Coomaraswamy, the U.N. Secretary-General’s special  representative for children and armed conflict.

“The government claims that a military panel has found that  these were not children. But the assessment of the international  agencies is that they are children.”

“I was assured today by the minister of justice that they  will not be executed,” she told reporters at the end of a trip  to Sudan.

The United Nations defines a child as anyone under 18.

More than 100 people were sentenced to death after being  convicted of taking part in an attack by Darfur’s rebel Justice  and Equality Movement (JEM) on the Khartoum suburb of Omdurman  in May last year.

Sudan’s president Omar Hassan Al-Bashir pardoned and freed  scores of children he said had been detained after taking part  in the unprecedented raid, which stopped just short of the  country’s parliament.

Coomaraswamy said U.N. staff had identified another six  children among the remaining convicts, but Sudan’s government  had said some of them were over 18 at the time of the attack.

No one was immediately available to comment yesterday from  Sudan’s ministry of justice.

“According to that law, no child can be executed,” foreign  ministry spokes-man Moawia Osman Khalid told Reuters. “If a court  handed out such a sentence, it would be overturned on appeal.”

Coomaraswamy said there was evidence that JEM was continuing  to recruit child soldiers, as were other rebels and pro-  government militias known as the janjaweed inside Darfur.

She said she had also met in southern Sudan children forced  into fighting by Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels.  “I would say the light had been completely erased from their  eyes after years of abuse.”

The special representative said there was no evidence that  Sudan’s official armed forces, or the southern Sudan People’s  Liberation Army (SPLA) were recruiting children, but some  children had been seen living around military camps.

JEM regularly denies taking on child soldiers.