The Security Council last week held an open debate on children affected by armed conflict, following the release of the annual report of Secretary-General on children and armed conflict, highlighting that children are still being recruited as soldiers, and also murdered, tortured or sexually abused during times of conflict, and listing parties recruiting children as soldiers.
Since it began to address children and armed conflict in 1999, the UN Security Council has made substantial progress in developing strategies and mechanisms to end abuses against children in conflict situations, particularly in regards to the recruitment and use of children as soldiers. Each Resolution adopted by the Council to date has built on those adopted previously, and advanced the agenda further.
Some of the most significant achievements of the Security Council attention to this agenda have included:
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the development of annual lists by the Secretary General to identify the specific governments and armed groups that recruit and use child soldiers in violation of international standards;
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clear expectations for dialogue with violators and the development of action plans to end child recruitment, resulting in greater involvement by UN country teams in addressing children and armed conflict issues;
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the establishment of a monitoring and reporting mechanism in seven countries to provide more detailed and comprehensive information on abuses for possible action by the Council;
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the establishment and activities of the Security Council Working Group on children and armed conflict, including its focused attention to the reports emanating from the monitoring and reporting mechanism and its concrete and specific recommendations for action to the Council;
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the first actions by the Security Council to apply targeted measures against individuals specifically for the recruitment and use of children as soldiers (SC Resolution 1698 on the Democratic Republic of Congo, 31st July 2006; the Security Council Committee concerning Cote d”Ivoire’s 7th February 2006 decision to subject Martin Kouakou Fofie to measures established by SC Resolution 1572).
These actions have resulted in a multifaceted set of tools and pressure points that, if fully utilised, represent a robust approach to ending abuses against children, including the recruitment and use of children as soldiers.
However, these mechanisms have not yet brought the results desired by the Security Council. Dozens of parties to armed conflict continue to recruit and use children with
impunity, and requests from the Security Council for action plans to end this practice have generally gone unheeded.
In this paper the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers recommends some next steps for the Security Council. Many (though not all) of these recommendations can be taken up by the Security Council Working Group on children and armed conflict and implemented through country-specific Resolutions.
Recommendations include:
Monitoring and reporting mechanism
Persistent violators
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Apply targeted measures to parties who use children in armed conflict such as travel bans, exclusion from governance structures, and restrictions on the flow of financial resources to the parties concerned.
Action plan
- Establish new deadlines for parties listed in this year’s report to create concrete and time-bound action plans. Request the Secretary-General to include an assessment of the successes and failures in developing action plans.
Dialogue with parties
- Request the Secretary-General to expand efforts to engage in dialogue to all parties in situations of armed conflict identified by the Secretary-General in the annexes to his report, and identify additional focal points within relevant UN country teams for this purpose;
- In situations on the Security Council’s agenda where systematic dialogue with parties has not taken place, request the Secretary-General to follow up with the UN country team focal points to create and implement a plan for substantive dialogue, with the objective of developing credible action plans.
Prosecutions
- Welcome the Democratic Republic of Congo’s prosecution of Jean Pierre Biyoyo, the only successful national-level prosecution to date for child recruitment and call on other member states to establish and implement mechanisms to investigate and prosecute individual perpetrators; request UN agencies to provide technical assistance, as appropriate.
- Request that information on national-level actions to identify and hold individual recruiters accountable through investigations, arrests, and prosecutions, are included in the country reports submitted through the UN monitoring and reporting mechanism to the Security Council working group on children and armed conflict.
Further information
