Human Rights Watch today welcomed a new United Nations policy establishing eighteen as the minimum age for UN peacekeepers.
"No one under the age of eighteen should take part in war, whether as part of a national army, an armed opposition group, or a member of a UN peacekeeping mission," said Jo Becker, Children's Rights Advocacy Director for Human Rights Watch. "Existing international standards to keep children out of armed conflict are completely inadequate. This new policy is a major step forward."
Announcing the new policy today in the Fourth Committee of the General Assembly, Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Bernard Miyet also stated that contributing governments are asked not to send military observers and civilian police younger than twenty-five years old, and that other peacekeeping troops should preferably be at least twenty-one, and definitely not younger than eighteen.
Human Rights Watch urged national governments to reflect the new UN policy in their domestic legislation. "The use of child combatants has become one of the most devastating aspects of contemporary warfare," said Becker, who is also steering committee chair of the international Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers. "National governments should be doing everything possible to stop this horrible practice. Raising their enlistment age to eighteen is one important move."
The latest research on child soldiers estimates that more than 300,000 children under 18 years old are fighting in armed conflicts around the world. Although existing international law allows the recruitment of children as young as fifteen, there is a growing movement to raise the minimum age to eighteen. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, now ratified by nearly every country in the world, defines a child as anyone under eighteen years of age, and entitled to special care and protection.
In late June, Human Rights Watch and other leading international nongovernmental organizations launched a new Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, which seeks to raise the minimum age for military recruitment and participation in armed conflict from fifteen to eighteen, through an optional protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
A U.N. working group mandated to draft such an optional protocol so far has failed to reach agreement on a text, despite four years of negotiations. The United States, supported by a small number of other states, has vigorously opposed an eighteen-year minimum for either military recruitment or participation in armed conflict, despite the fact that as one of only two countries that has failed to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, it would not even be eligible to join the optional protocol.
On June 29, following a special UN Security Council debate, the Council issued a presidential statement condemning the targeting of children in armed conflict. A July 1998 treaty establishing an International Criminal Court (ICC) gave the court the authority to prosecute as a war crime the conscription and use in hostilities of children under the age of fifteen.
