Activists urge UN to prosecute recruiters of child soldiers

Though the coalition condemned governments and armed groups in many African, Asian and South American countries for recruiting child soldiers, it also criticized the United States and Britain for enlisting people younger than 18 to serve in their armed forces.

With such a widespread problem, the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers is urging member nations of the UN Security Council to "provide the political leadership to enforce a ban on child soldiers," the coalition's director Casey Kelso told a press conference in London.

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Founded by groups like London-based Amnesty International and New York-based Human Rights Watch, the coalition backs the prosecution of child recruiters by the International Criminal Court of Justice.

The court, which was established in 1998, defines the recruitment of children under 15 as a "war crime."

The coalition is also campaigning for restrictions on military assistance or training as well as economic sanctions on governments and non-governmental armed groups who violate a "de facto ban" on recruiting soldiers younger than 18.

Some 85 countries have ratified the so-called 2002 UN child soldiers treaty (optional protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child) that bans using all children under the age of 18 in hostilities.

Mehr Kahn Williams, deputy commissioner for the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Commission, said hundreds of thousands of children, some as young as nine years old, were engaged as child soldiers in more than two dozen conflicts worldwide.

She said the coalition's "key message is the enforcement of laws that exist."

Kahn Williams and Kelso said that the number of children recruited to fight by their governments was decreasing slightly, but armed groups worldwide were still recruiting as many as ever.

"They are making some effort to live up to their obligations but ... it's not enough," Kahn Williams said.

She said that it is "illegal, morally unacceptable for children to fight in adult wars."

The Coalition studied more than 20 countries and territories where armed hostilities occurred between March 2002 and March 2004, as it prepared the most comprehensive report on child soldiers ever.

Between 2001 and 2004, children were involved in armed conflicts in Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, India, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, Indonesia, Liberia, Myanmar, Nepal, Philippines, the Russian Federation, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda, the report said.

Governments using child soldiers were listed as: Burundi, DR Congo, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Myanmar, Rwanda, Sudan, Uganda and the United States.