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International UN Conference Sheds Light on Children in Conflict

27/06/2016

International UN conference sheds light on children in conflict

A University of Wolverhampton Professor has been instrumental in instigating a series of triennial international conferences with the third one being held in Austria next month – focusing on children’s experiences during and after armed conflicts.

The Children and War: Past and Present conference will be held at the University of Salzburg between 13th and 15th July and has been organised by the University of Salzburg and the University of Wolverhampton, in association with the United Nations Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict.

Professor Johannes-Dieter Steinert, Modern European History and Migration Studies at the University of Wolverhampton and part of the organising team, said: “The third international, multi-disciplinary conference, which is supported by the Foundation 'Remembrance, Responsibility and Future' (EVZ), brings together 160 speakers from countries around the world including America, Europe, Canada, Africa and Australia.

“The conference will focus on areas of research already investigated and will open up new fields of academic enquiry.”

Topics covered at the conference will include repatriation and reintegration, children’s experiences during World War One and Two, surviving the Holocaust, ghettos and camps, child soldiers, children as victims, witnesses and participants in armed conflicts, genocide and forced labour, war crimes, trials and human rights and deportation and displacement, refugees and asylum seekers.

Sharon Riggle, UN Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, and Gloria Atiba Davies, International Criminal Court, The Hague are keynote speakers at the conference.

Professor Steinert was a keynote speaker at the Haifa Ethics Conference at the University of Haifa in Israel in May talking about “British and American NGOs in Belsen concentration camp”.  During the same month he gave a public lecture on “Polish and Soviet child forced labourers in Nazi Germany and German occupied Eastern Europe” at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial site in Germany and in June he lectured at the “Nationalism, Religion & Violence Summer Seminar” at the Charles University Prague, Czech Republic, on child forced labour during the Second World War.

For more details of the conference check out the website: www.wlv.ac.uk/childrenandwar

Photo credit: "A little girl wandering through a ruined street in the village of Szydlow, Poland". Courtesy of UN Archives and Records Management, New York (Record Group S-1058-0001-01).

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Date Issued:  27th June 2016

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