By Jeremy Clarke

NAIROBI, April 18 (Reuters) - Children in southern Sudan face "wartime-levels" of sexual violence despite the 2005 peace agreement that ended 21 years of civil conflict in the region, a rights group said in a report on Wednesday.

Significant improvements in security and access to services in the south of the east African nation have not noticeably reduced the number of such incidents, which is in the tens of thousands, the Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict said.

"The perpetrators have changed, but the aggregate of cases is the same as during the war -- a statistician would tell you there is no difference," said Sarah Spencer, spokeswoman for the Watchlist, a global network of non-governmental organisations.

"As southern Sudan moved from conflict to post-conflict, the types of abuse changed -- with fewer armed abductions and more forced and early marriages -- yet ultimately the high numbers did not decrease," she added, speaking at the presentation of the group's report in Nairobi.

Across Sudan, other victims are similarly no better off than four years ago, Spencer said. "In Sudan they face sharia law, so victims must provide four witnesses to prove rape. If not, they can be charged with adultery in extreme cases."

Some 50 months after the end of the conflict that claimed two million lives, south Sudan still lacks adequate health infrastructure and qualified personnel, and has only one primary healthcare centre for every 79,500 people, Watchlist said.

"This report is scathing of the governments of Sudan and of all power-brokers in the region," said aid worker Dan Langoya, adding that so much had gone wrong in the region that aid agencies were unable to be widely effective.

Watchlist issued its report against a backdrop of rising violence in west Sudan's Darfur, where thousands of children face the threat of abduction, sexual abuse, armed attacks, mutilation, torture and forced displacement.

Watchlist said it was hard to gather accurate information from troubled Darfur, partly because aid organisations were reluctant to publicise information critical of the government, fearing for the survival of their life-saving programmes.

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