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Campaigning for Justice
Human Rights Advocacy in Practice
By Jo Becker
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7451-2
Chapter One
Campaigning to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers The mayi-mayi took twelve girls and ten boys from my village. I was fourteen. Some were younger, between ten and thirteen. Everyone went to the front, even the little ones.... It was terrible—you would be whipped if you did something wrong. Once, I'd been ordered to carry some bananas but they were too heavy so I left some behind. As a punishment, I was tied by my arms and feet and given twenty lashes with a rope. —Joseph, recruited by government-allied militia in the Democratic Republic of Congo
FIGHTING FORCES HAVE USED CHILDREN as soldiers for millennia, but the phenomenon escalated with the end of the Cold War and the proliferation of armed conflicts in the 1990s. By the end of the decade, an estimated three hundred thousand children under age eighteen were participating in more than thirty armed conflicts raging around the globe. Their ranks included children as young as eight recruited into paramilitaries in Colombia, teenage boys picked up off the street in Burma and forced into the national army, and girls kidnapped from their homes by the Lord's Resistance Army in Central Africa for use as soldiers and sex slaves.
Some child soldiers are forcibly recruited and compelled to follow orders under threat of death. Others, their lives devastated by poverty or war, join armed groups out of desperation. As society breaks down during conflict, children are often left with no access to school, driven from their homes, or separated from their families. Many perceive armed groups as their best chance for survival. Others join to avenge abuses against their family, or are lured by promises of a good salary or education. Most child soldiers are adolescents, but some are as young as eight years old. Many are female. In conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, Uganda, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere, more than 30 percent of child soldiers were girls. Girl soldiers are often trained and deployed into combat, but also subject to sexual exploitation or forced to become the sex slaves of commanders.
Child soldiers may start out as porters, cooks, or messengers, but too often, they end up on the front line of combat. Considered "dispensable," child soldiers are sometimes pushed into the most hazardous roles—going into minefields ahead of older troops, or being used for suicide missions. Those who survive and are released or escape often face huge hurdles reintegrating into civilian society. Many have little or no education, no marketable job skills, and emotional and psychological problems stemming from their experiences. Some have been forced to commit atrocities against their family or neighbors, creating significant social stigma and sometimes outright rejection from their home communities.
As recently as the year 2000, international law allowed fighting forces to recruit children as young as fifteen years old and send them into warfare. This standard was an anomaly within accepted children's rights standards. In the 1980s, governments negotiated the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), a comprehensive children's treaty that protected children under the age of eighteen from exploitative labor, torture, and other abuse. The treaty had become the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history. However, its universal protections included a glaring exception. Instead of setting eighteen as the minimum age for military recruitment or participation in armed conflict, it adopted a lower age of fifteen, based on the 1977 additional protocols to the Geneva Conventions.
In the mid-1990s, governments agreed to try to redress the discrepancy and raise the minimum age for recruitment and participation in hostilities. Instead of amending the original Convention (which would require agreement by two-thirds of ratifying states), however, governments believed it would be more realistic to negotiate an optional protocol. Such a protocol would have the status of a treaty, but it would not be legally binding on a country unless the government specifically chose to ratify it. In 1994, the United Nation's Commission on Human Rights established a working group, open to any UN member state, to negotiate such an optional protocol.
Governments began a series of annual negotiations in Geneva, but by 1998, negotiations floundered as it became clear that governments that had long used under-eighteens in their national armed forces, notably the United States and United Kingdom, were not willing to support a new standard that conflicted with their national practice. According to Martin MacPherson, a legal advisor for Amnesty International, "We were up against a major opponent, namely the US and the Pentagon, that showed very little flexibility on the issue and took a very hard line." US laws dating from 1917 allowed seventeen year olds to volunteer for the US armed forces with parental permission. Even though their proportion of the total active-duty US armed forces was very small, the armed forces typically deployed these young recruits as soon as their basic and technical training was complete, including for combat. In the early 1990s, seventeen-year-old US soldiers fought in Somalia, Bosnia, and the 1991 Gulf War. The UK had an even bigger problem: it allowed sixteen year olds to join the armed forces and serve in combat roles, and a much larger proportion of its soldiers were under eighteen.
The United States argued that the most significant problem was the recruitment of children under fifteen in violation of existing international standards and that adopting an age of seventeen for recruitment and participation in armed conflict had "a greater potential to secure consensus among the members of the General Assembly." In demarches to other capitals, the United States said it could not accept eighteen as the minimum age for either voluntary recruitment or participation in armed conflict. Advocates of an eighteen-year age standard responded that in countries where children commonly lacked age documentation, a legal age of fifteen allowed commanders to recruit even younger children of twelve or thirteen without undue scrutiny, and that military expediency did not justify adopting lesser protections for children facing the dangers of warfare than for children at risk of other forms of exploitation.
Although the United States was the most vocal opponent of the new treaty, a handful of other states initially supported its position. Of the fifty governments that participated in the 1998 negotiations, seven—Bangladesh, Cuba, Israel, Korea, Kuwait, Pakistan, and the UK—joined the United States in supporting a minimum age of seventeen for participation in armed conflict. Some of these states, however, attempted to distance themselves from the hard-line position taken by the United States. Four of these states, including the UK, stated that they would not block an agreement that set an age of eighteen. Forty-one explicitly supported eighteen as a minimum age for participation in armed conflict. In the face of US intransigence, however, governments reached an impasse. Unable to reach agreement, they adjourned the session three days early.
Following the failed 1998 session, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that were following the negotiations decided that a global campaign was necessary to mobilize the political will needed to overcome the objections of the United States and its allies to conclude a strong treaty. "We had done as much as we could as individual NGOs," said Rachel Brett, a human rights lawyer working for the Quaker United Nations Office in Geneva.
The Campaign
In May 1998, representatives of six nongovernmental organizations met in Geneva to form the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers. At its first meeting, the fledgling coalition agreed on a specific goal: the adoption and implementation of an international standard setting eighteen as the minimum age for any recruitment (whether forced or voluntary) or participation in armed conflict. This became known as the "straight-18" standard.
The organizations forming the new coalition included both human rights and humanitarian groups—Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, International Federation Terre des Hommes, Jesuit Refugee Service, the Quaker United Nations Office (Geneva), and Save the Children. Even prior to the first meeting, the Quakers secured $50,000 in seed money from the Canadian government to hire the coalition's first coordinator, Stuart Maslen, a veteran organizer who had worked with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
The coalition knew it had limited time to influence government positions before negotiations resumed. It embarked on an ambitious campaign to influence the course of the negotiations on the optional protocol, including publishing new research, organizing a series of high-profile regional conferences, supporting advocacy by national coalitions, and cultivating alliances with sympathetic governments. Maslen secured additional funds from sympathetic governments to hire a small staff, while the organizations that formed the coalition's new steering committee committed both funds and substantial staff time to push the coalition's agenda forward. The steering committee met several times a year to shape the coalition's strategy, inviting participation by UNICEF, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the International Labor Organization.
At the campaign's genesis, knowledge of the child soldiers issue among the public and even policymakers was low. The coalition produced a basic briefing booklet geared to diplomats, NGO activists, and the public, stressing the scale of the child soldier problem, the short- and long-term negative impacts on the lives of children, and the inadequacy of existing international standards. Coalition volunteers soon translated the booklets into a dozen different languages. The Red Cross and UNICEF sent them to all of their field offices. The coalition also quickly established a website, produced posters, advocacy videos, and worked to place stories in the mainstream media.
Maslen's experience with the landmines campaign had convinced him that regional organizing needed to be a priority. "You want to coalesce the regional groups," he said. "When you have the Africans speaking with one voice, saying that 'this is a problem and we want you to do something,' it's very hard for the West to do nothing. The regional conferences were mind-numbingly difficult in terms of organization and funding, but were the right way to go." The coalition organized a series of regional conferences for representatives of governments, civil society, and UN agencies to share information about the use of child soldiers in the region and strategies for preventing child recruitment and addressing the demobilization, rehabilitation, and reintegration needs of former child soldiers. A critical element of each conference was the negotiation of a public declaration that was adopted by participants at its conclusion, expressing the principle that children under age eighteen should not be recruited or used in warfare and addressing regional aspects of the issue. Although the declarations were not binding, they were used to bolster the commitment of governments to the "straight-18" principle and to generate momentum toward a strong optional protocol. Sympathetic governments agreed to host the conferences and issued invitations to ensure strong representation from other governments in their region.
Mozambique hosted the first conference in April 1999 for the African region. More than 250 individuals from thirty African countries attended, including officials from twenty-five African governments and observers from supportive governments outside the region. On the opening day of the conference, the coalition released a new report, providing a country-by-country survey on the use of child soldiers in Africa. In addition to a press conference in Maputo, the report was released at coordinated press conferences in London, Geneva, Bonn, Paris, and New York, generating substantial media coverage. On the final day of the conference, participants adopted the Maputo Declaration, unequivocally condemning the use of child soldiers and calling for legal standards and measures at every level to prohibit any military service by children under the age of eighteen. During the conference, nearly a dozen African countries made public their commitment to ratify the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, the only regional treaty that set eighteen as the minimum age for recruitment and participation of children in armed conflict. Janet Mukwaya, the Ugandan minister of gender, labor, and social development, spearheaded the pledge effort supported by the International Save the Children Alliance. In large part because of these additional commitments, the African Charter went into force just a few months later, on November 29, 1999.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Campaigning for Justice by Jo Becker Copyright © 2013 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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