Describing Similar Ground as a community-based organization helping children recover from their trauma, he emphasized: “There are thousands of children currently going through what I did.” He pressed the Council to include “people like me” in the decisions it makes, acknowledging that, while he was grateful for the opportunity to speak today, “one young person, once a year, is not enough”. Over 70 speakers took the floor to outline actions desperately needed to end child recruitment and use, killing and maiming, abductions, rape and other forms of sexual violence, attacks on schools and hospitals, and the denial of humanitarian access - crimes laid bare in the Secretary-General’s latest report (document A/76/871-S/2022/493). Patrick Kumi’s briefing, along with those of the Secretary-General’s Special Representative and the Executive Director of the United Nations Children’s Fund, commenced the Security Council’s annual open debate covering the six grave violations against children in situations on the Council’s agenda. In a harrowing account of his own abduction in South Sudan, where an armed group had tortured him and had killed his father in front of his eyes, the founder of the Similar Ground organization called on the Security Council today to enforce the myriad resolutions it has passed to secure the safety of children around the world who are at the mercy of wars and conflicts they did not start nor should ever be forced to endure.

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