French President Francois Hollande vowed on Thursday to take stern action against French troops found guilty of child sex abuse in Central African Republic.
A U.N. report suggested that French, Chadian and Equatorial Guinea troops were implicated.
The allegations, which came to light this week due to an internal U.N. report summarizing interviews with victims, risks damaging the reputation of France’s peacekeeping operations in Africa.
Reuters obtained the U.N. report on Thursday, though the Guardian newspaper was the first to report on the charges.
The United Nations has defended its decision to hand the evidence over to French authorities from a 2014 investigation of allegations that French military personnel sexually abused children in the Central African Republic.
The U.N. Deputy spokesman for the secretary general, Farhan Haq has said that the UN doesn’t try to interfere with countries’ investigative processes.
” What we did is through our Human Rights offices in Bangui conduct a human rights investigation in the late spring of 2014. That was in response to a series of allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse of children by French military personnel. We tried to make sure that was followed up on and in fact it is being followed up on. In terms of when it’s being made public, I believe the French authorities have their own way of processing this and you really need to ask them the question of how they disclose this sort of information as they go about this.”
Inspite of French President Francois Hollande’s declaration that there would be no mercy for any soldiers found to have abused children in the Central African Republic.
There are concerns that this scandal could cost his troops goodwill in the region.
There are already mixed reactions to the allegations among those affected by the conflict in the Central African Republic.
Authorities in the Central African Republic however feel that it would have been better if the report had been made public.
The French government has said it is carrying out two separate investigations into claims that 16 of it’s soldiers abused vulnerable children at a camp for internally displaced people.
France sent an initial 1,600 troops to the country in December 2013 after violence flared following a coup.
The country descended into ethnic and sectarian violence, with thousands of people fleeing their homes and the UN warning that there was a high risk of genocide.
The UN took over and expanded the African peacekeeping mission in September
