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Campaigning for Justice

Stanford University Press

Contents

Foreword..............................................................................................viiIntroduction..........................................................................................11 Campaigning to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers.......................................................112 Organizing for Decent Work for Domestic Workers: The ILO Convention.................................323 Defeating the Election of Human Rights Abusers to the UN Human Rights Council.......................594 Working with UN Special Rapporteurs to Promote Human Rights.........................................775 Creating a New International Priority: Ending Violence Against Children.............................956 Bringing Charles Taylor to Justice..................................................................1137 Seeking Justice for the Abu Salim Prison Massacre...................................................1318 Demanding Accountability for War Crimes in Sri Lanka................................................1529 Using New Technologies in the Campaign to Free Tibet: The 2008 Beijing Olympics.....................17710 Organizing for LGBTI Rights in Jamaica and Nepal...................................................19711 Abolishing Sentences of Life Without Parole for Juvenile Offenders.................................222Lessons for the Future................................................................................245Notes.................................................................................................261Further Reading and Additional Resources..............................................................299Glossary of Key Terms.................................................................................305Acknowledgments.......................................................................................307Index.................................................................................................309

Chapter One

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...