G8 told to listen to children

Children from some of the world's poorest nations are holding an alternative to this week's G8 summit. Dubbed C8, the young delegates taking part are calling on their senior counterparts to act now to end child prostitution, child labour and trafficking.

"Now is the moment to help poor children because we have suffered too much. I want the G8 leaders to make it stop. It is time to listen to the children," 17-year-old Assiatou Drame told reporters.

A refugee from Sierra Leone now living in Guinea, Drame told a news conference at the C8 Children's Forum she had never been to school and had to work all her life.

Setting out an agenda for the leaders of the Group of Eight industrialised nations, the boys and girls, from Africa, Asia and Latin America, were joined by others from Europe in the small Scottish town of Dunblane.

Actor Ewan McGregor, an ambassador for the United Nations' Children's Fund (UNICEF), which organized the C8 Forum, praised their passion and involvement.

"Their experiences and opinions of issues like war, poverty and the rise of HIV/AIDS gives compelling and real evidence of why we all need to call on the G8 leaders to make child poverty history," he said.

"They are the ones who will inherit the results of the decisions the G8 leaders are going to make. They are the ones we need to listen to," he added.

The leaders of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Italy, Japan and Russia meet amid tight security in Gleneagles, 65 kilometres northwest of Edinburgh from tomorrow to Friday.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the current G8 president, has made tackling global warming and ending the triple curse of debt, disease and poverty in Africa the key goals of the summit.

The Live 8 rock concerts and a march by 200,000 people through the Scottish capital on Saturday to support the "Make Poverty History" campaign have shown the G8 leaders how much people have taken the issue to heart.

Trapped in poverty

One child dies a preventable death every three seconds somewhere in the world, according to UNICEF.

Some 180 million children are trapped in the worst forms of child labour, 1.2 million are trafficked each year and 2 million are involved in the sex industry. Some of the stories the children swapped with each other were harrowing.

Paola Rospigliozi, a 17-year-old, said poverty was so rife in her native Bolivia that mothers sometimes hired out their babies to other women so they could use them to beg on the streets, or they sold them into prostitution or for organ transplants.

Aminata Palmer, a feisty 11-year-old from Sierra Leone, said she had witnessed first hand the exploitation of children in her country which is ranked by the United Nations as the poorest in the world.

"We want to see an end to child exploitation. That is why we are here," she said. "I want to say to the G8 if you fail to react we will never forgive you."

World Day Against Child Labour was marked for the third time this year on June 12 by Global March Against Child Labour, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and a host of other campaigning organizations, focusing on the often overlooked plight of domestic child labour, by holding mass actions worldwide.

The day also saw the release of the Children's Declaration, a document agreed at the recently concluded First Children's World Congress on Child Labour in Florence, Italy.

The ILO estimates that there are about 1 million children, aged 5-17, working in informal mines and quarries throughout the world.

Child miners often go underground to dig for valuable minerals, such as gold or silver. Some perform hazardous work outside the mines. Many work in open pits or riverbeds.

"Virtually all of these children work in small-scale mines and quarries that usually are in remote areas and beyond the scope of regulation. Typically, these are family-based operations that lack mechanisation and proper tools and safety measures to protect workers," the ILO said in a statement.

Source: China Daily