November 16, 2001	Friday	Shaba'an 29, 1422

UNITED NATIONS: An international treaty banning the use of child soldiers will be a reality early next year, human rights advocates say.

The treaty is expected to enter into legal force on February 12, 2002, exactly two months after earning its 10th ratification, by New Zealand.

“This is a huge advance in the effort to end the use of children as child soldiers,” says Jo Becker of Human Rights Watch.

The treaty also has been ratified by Andorra, Bangladesh, Canada, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Iceland, Panama, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and the Holy See.

“We are hoping that other countries will follow the lead,” Becker says.

Implementation of the treaty will be monitored chiefly by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child but the non-governmental Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers also will play a role, she says.

“Every country which has ratified the treaty will be asked to submit a report (to the UN commission) within two years,” she adds.

The treaty, described as an optional protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, prohibits the participation of children under the age of 18 in armed conflict as well as their forced recruitment or conscription.

So far, 87 countries have signed the protocol — signifying their intent to implement it but falling short of actual legal ratification. Some of these countries are expected to ratify the protocol before the UN Special Session on Children scheduled to take place in New York May 8-10 next year.

According to Human Rights Watch, an estimated 300,000 children younger than 18 are fighting in armed conflicts in more than 40 countries. These include Afghanistan, Angola, Burma (also known as Myanmar), Colombia, the DRC, Sierra Leone, and Sri Lanka.

The United Nations has said that in the last 10 years, two million children were killed, six million hurt, 10 million traumatized, and one million left orphaned by armed conflicts worldwide.

In Colombia, government-backed paramilitaries recruit children as young as eight years old, according to Becker. And in the DRC, unarmed children have been sent ahead of older troops to draw enemy fire.

In Sri Lanka, child soldiers have been sent on suicide missions by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), an armed group fighting for a separate nation state in the country’s northern and eastern provinces.

Welcoming the new treaty, Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar said his country was one of the first to ratify the protocol banning child soldiers.

“The world should never condone the forcible conscription of young children — a particularly abhorrent brand of terrorism practised by the terrorists of Sri Lanka and well documented by Amnesty International, the UN Children’s Fund and the UN’s Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict,” Kadirgamar told the UN General Assembly on Tuesday.

“It would be a permanent blot on the conscience of mankind if these poor children were to be consigned unnoticed, uncared for, to their miserable fate,” he added.

Becker says that even though the treaty will not be binding on armed groups, there are provisions relating to the use of child soldiers by these groups.

She says that one of the provisions of the treaty calls on states to take effective measures to criminalize the use of child soldiers by insurgent groups.

Olara Otunnu, the UN Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict, says most parties to conflicts have used child soldiers. These include not only guerrillas and insurgents but also states.

“It is probably true that child soldiers were more widely used by insurgent groups than by states,” he says. “However, there were many examples of both states and insurgent groups using children.”

Otunnu also points out that the prohibition on the use of children soldiers would not be limited to situations of war or civil conflict.

“Any young person below the age of 17 could not be recruited into a national army, and any young person below the age of 18 could not be made to participate in a conflict,” he explains.

Child soldiers already in service will have to be released. Yet, finances have already proven inadequate to support their rehabilitation in countries where they are being demobilized, he says. These include Sierra Leone and Sudan.

In addition to providing services to help child soldiers through the transition back to civilian life, it also is “essential to work with the local community to avoid the ostracism of those children, who had suffered traumatic and distorting experiences, from their communities of origin,” he adds.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.