Geneva - UN rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein on Friday said France should have probed much earlier claims that its soldiers raped children in the Central African Republic between December 2013 and June 2014.
Zeid said the delayed response was all the more difficult to comprehend since people other than the accused must have known of the abuse but not passed the information up the military hierarchy.
"France now has an opportunity to set a really high benchmark of conduct," he told a news conference.
"It's not just simply prosecutions that must be undertaken but a very serious investigation into the force structure and why it was that these allegations were not being investigated by the French authorities at the time," he said.
Fourteen soldiers have been placed under investigation after six children alleged that some were sexually abused by French peacekeepers over a seven-month period.
French authorities launched an investigation after receiving a leaked internal United Nations report in July 2014 and sent a police team to the Central African Republic in August, but no soldiers or children were questioned.
Zeid said that, according to reports, one child was abused on "a road at 9 o'clock in the evening."
AFP
