Human Rights Watch, which chairs
the international Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, celebrated an important victory with the passage of a treaty banning the use of children as soldiers.

After six years of negotiations, governments finally agreed on a treaty establishing eighteen as the minimum age for participation in armed conflicts. The treaty, which has been formally adopted by the U.N. General Assembly, will likely enter into force in 2001.

The coalition, led by Human Rights Watch, generated pressure that helped persuade the United States to reverse its position on the treaty. We argued that the U.S. government, having opposed international treaties to ban anti-personnel landmines and to establish an international criminal court, risked losing influence and credibility as a defender of human rights if it also opposed the child soldiers treaty.
Child soldiers in Monrovia head into a fighting zone.
Liberia, 1996. Photo Corinne Dufka

In early 2000, the United States consented for the first time to end the deployment of minors in combat. Until then, it had vigorously opposed the eighteen-year minimum. This major policy shift allowed the treaty to go forward and marked the first time that the United States had ever agreed to change its practices in order to support an international human rights standard.

The new treaty could help spare hundreds of thousands of children from having to participate in armed combat. An estimated 300,000 children under the age of eighteen are currently engaged in such conflicts around the world. Human Rights Watch has documented the use of children as soldiers in Uganda, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Colombia, Angola, Liberia, and Lebanon. Children are often given the most dangerous assignments, such as deployment on the front lines of combat. Others are forced to serve as porters, spies, guides, and in the case of many girls, as sexual slaves to military commanders.

The treaty also requires states to cooperate in the demobilization of child soldiers and to assist in their rehabilitation and reintegration. For thousands of children who have been deprived of safe environments, this transition cannot happen quickly enough.