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External sources (not reviewed)

These ongoing weapons flows mean many thousands of deaths, millions of displaced persons and refugees, and billions of dollars spent on humanitarian assistance and emergency relief aid.

Irregular migrants are more likely to be targeted by xenophobes and racists, victimized by unscrupulous employers and sexual predators, and can easily fall prey to criminal traffickers and smugglers.

This produced copious perspirations, [...] [...]

Nevertheless, since the establishment of the United Nations more than half a century ago, millions of children, women and men have been victims of atrocities resulting from the use of force, crimes of genocide, illegal intervention and more than 60 wars on different continents, including the wars in Grenada, Korea, Panama, Somalia, Suez, Viet Nam and the former Yugoslavia, as well as the current war in Iraq in its various aspects and the war in Afghanistan.

In many parts of the world, especially Africa, the HIV/AIDS pandemic has forced older women, already living in difficult circumstances, to take on the added burden of caring for children and grandchildren with HIV/AIDS and for grandchildren orphaned by AIDS.

Furthermore the right to life has also been interpreted in some cases as a right to live in dignity which would encompass the right to food, the right to clean water and protection from absolute poverty.

Accounts reveal that women and girls have been abducted and held as sexual slaves both by FARDC members and other armed actors, and have been subject to collective rapes for weeks and months, often accompanied by additional atrocities.

The important gains made by countries in special situations in achieving internationally agreed development goals were in danger of reversal; and well-performing economies were being pushed into the ranks of those deemed to be in special situations because of serious financial and economic distress.

Under article 23 of the African Charter, States shall take “all appropriate measures” to ensure that children seeking or holding refugee status, as well as those who are internally displaced due to events including “natural disaster” are able to “receive appropriate protection and humanitarian assistance in the enjoyment of the rights set out in this Charter and other international human rights and humanitarian instruments to which the States are Parties”.

Looking back to the causes and epiphenomena of Kosovo’s humanitarian crisis (which the present Advisory Opinion of the Court just briefly refers to, while avoiding any examination whatsoever of the relevant facts which led to it), the deprivation of Kosovo’s autonomy (previously secured by the Constitution of 1974) in 1989, paved the way for the cycle of systematic discrimination, utmost violence and atrocities which victimized large segments of the population of Kosovo, along one decade (1989-1999), leading to the adoption of a series of resolutions by the main political organs of the United Nations, and culminating in the adoption of Security Council resolution 1244(1999).

(c) To undertake, in cooperation with relevant organizations, information campaigns aimed at clarifying prospects, limitations, potential risks and rights in the event of migration in order to enable everyone, in particular women and children and their family members, to make informed decisions and to prevent them from becoming victims of trafficking or falling prey to transnational organized networks of smugglers or organized criminal groups

It is imperative for the Security Council not to step into the same situation in which it was once misused as a tool of high-handedness and hegemony of the United States by giving legitimacy to its armed invasion into Iraq, based on a single word of lies of Powell, United States Secretary of State, in February 2003.

The hardships of Al-Nakba continue for the Palestinian people as they continue to live either in exile as refugees throughout the region and the Diaspora or under the belligerent military occupation of Israel, the occupying Power, since 1967 in the Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, forced to endure the systematic violation of their fundamental human rights and war crimes at the hands of the occupying Power for nearly 44 years.