Burkina Faso Expels Top UN Official Over Report on Child Recruitment

Burkina Faso’s military government has expelled the United Nations’ top representative in the country, declaring her “persona non grata” after a UN report accused both jihadist groups and national defence forces of recruiting children in the country’s prolonged insurgency.

The junta announced on Monday that Carol Flore-Smereczniak, the UN resident humanitarian coordinator, must leave, accusing her of bearing “responsibility” for what it called a deeply flawed report. According to the authorities, the document carried “baseless” claims that the Burkinabe army and its civilian auxiliaries were also implicated in human rights abuses against minors.

The March report, titled Children and Armed Conflict in Burkina Faso, detailed grave violations such as “the recruitment and use of children, the killing and maiming of children, rape and other forms of sexual violence against children, attacks on schools, hospitals and protected persons in relation to schools and/or hospitals, the abduction of children and the denial of humanitarian access.”

Investigators attributed most of the child recruitment cases to jihadist factions, particularly the Al-Qaeda-linked Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM) and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS). But the UN also held the country’s security forces and their auxiliaries, the Volunteers for the Defence of the Nation, responsible for around one-fifth of the violations.

The government dismissed those findings, denouncing the document as unreliable. “This report, which resembles a compilation of baseless assertions and falsehoods, contains no appendices with copies of investigation reports or court rulings to support the alleged cases of violations against children attributed to the valiant Burkinabe fighters,” its statement read.

UN investigators had documented cases in which Volunteers for the Defence of the Nation kidnapped 23 children and were implicated in four out of 20 verified cases of rape.

Flore-Smereczniak, a Mauritian national appointed in July 2024, is not the first senior UN figure to be expelled from Burkina Faso. In December 2022, her predecessor, Italian official Barbara Manzi, was also declared “persona non grata.”

Burkina Faso has been battling Islamist insurgents for more than a decade. Since 2015, attacks attributed to jihadist groups have claimed over 26,000 lives, with more than half of the deaths recorded in just the past three years.

Despite taking power in a September 2022 coup with promises to restore order, the junta has struggled to contain the violence. Both its forces and allied civilian militias continue to face accusations of committing atrocities against civilians, even as the insurgency pushes deeper into the country.