• Lubanga in the courtroom at the International Criminal Court.
    © 2010 Reuters
    ICC: Landmark Verdict a Warning to Rights Abusers

    The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) guilty verdict against rebel leader Thomas Lubanga Dyilo for recruiting and using child soldiers in hostilities is a first step in bringing justice to the tens of thousands of children forced to fight in conflicts, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and elsewhere. The verdict highlights the need to urgently arrest Lubanga’s co-accused, Bosco Ntaganda, who is currently a general in the Congo army in Goma, eastern Congo, and continues to evade justice.

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Child Soldiers

  • DR Congo: Arrest Bosco Ntaganda for ICC Trial
    Apr 13, 2012

    President Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo should immediately order the arrest of Gen. Bosco Ntaganda and promptly transfer him to The Hague for a fair trial. Ntaganda is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes.
     

  • Q&A on Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army
    Mar 21, 2012
    Joseph Kony is the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a Ugandan rebel group that originated in 1987 in northern Uganda among ethnic Acholi communities.
  • From Campaigning to Action on Joseph Kony and the LRA
    Mar 14, 2012

    In the past week, a 30-minute video about Joseph Kony and his rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), has received more than 90 million internet hits. Viewers of the video now know, if they didn’t before, that he is a wanted man with much blood on his hands. For years Human Rights Watch has investigated the LRA’s horrors, from Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo to the Central African Republic (CAR) and South Sudan. We have visited remote massacre sites and listened to hundreds of victims and survivors who want their stories heard.

  • Child Soldiers Worldwide
    Mar 12, 2012
    Around the globe, Human Rights Watch has documented the recruitment and use of children as soldiers. Today, child soldiers are fighting in at least 14 countries:
  • How to Catch Joseph Kony
    Mar 9, 2012
    We’ve spent years investigating the horrors perpetrated by the LRA in central Africa — Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic (CAR), and South Sudan. We gathered evidence at massacre sites — wooden clubs covered in dried blood, rubber strips from bicycle tires used to tie up the victims, and freshly dug graves – and spoke to hundreds of boys and girls forced to fight for his army or held captive as sex slaves. And we’re elated that #stopKony is a trending topic on Twitter – if anyone deserves global notoriety it’s Kony.
  • Somalia: Warring Parties Put Children at Grave Risk
    Feb 21, 2012
    Somalia’s warring parties have all failed to protect Somali children from the fighting or serving in their forces, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The Islamist insurgent group al-Shabaab has increasingly targeted children for recruitment, forced marriage, and rape, and attacked teachers and schools.
  • Getting children off the battlefield
    Feb 13, 2012
    The experience of the last decade, shows that the governments and groups still using child soldiers are increasingly considered pariahs, and that strategic pressure and the new consensus of international law can protect children from war. The challenge now is to build on the momentum that exists, and to make better use of the existing tools — including sanctions, prosecutions, and UN negotiations — to persuade the remaining outliers that children have no place in war.
  • US: Don’t Finance Child Soldiers
    Oct 4, 2011
    The US government should reverse its decision to continue military assistance to governments using child soldiers.
  • Yemen: Stop Using Children in Armed Forces
    Apr 14, 2011
    Child soldiers recruited by the Yemeni army are now being used by a breakaway unit to protect anti-government protesters. The United States and other governments should call for an immediate end to the use of children as soldiers or in other security forces, whether for the Yemeni government or the opposition.
  • Letter to President Obama regarding US implementation of the Child Soldiers Prevention Act of 2008
    Apr 12, 2011
    Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Open Society Foundations, and World Vision write to President Obama regarding US implementation of the Child Soldiers Prevention Act of 2008, and specifically, the failure of your administration to fulfill its pledge to secure concrete progress by the governments of Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), (South) Sudan, and Yemen in ending their use of children as soldiers.
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