While we continue to grapple with the implications of COVID-19, last week we got some good news. The UK government published its updated approach to the protection of civilians in armed conflict.
Save the Children has been campaigning for this for the last two years. The government’s announcement is an important win for children living in conflict.
The previous strategy was published in 2010. It made no mention of the 415 million children worldwide living in a conflict zone, including 149 million in high-intensity war zones.
As conflict dynamics evolved in the past decade to present new challenges and actors, the government’s strategy became quickly out of date, leaving the UK’s policies and practices out of sync with the new realities of protecting children and their families in conflict. At the same time, the global health pandemic has further exacerbated risks to children’s protection.
So how does this new approach help children?
We called on the government to update its civilian protection strategy to include specific actions to enhance the protection of children living in conflict by recognising their specific vulnerabilities. The paper has done this in three key ways:
First, unlike the previous strategy, the 2020 approach commits to ensure child-specific expertise in peace support and military operations as well as training officials and troops both in the UK and abroad to ensure the protection of children is at the forefront of operations.
Second, the paper includes a commitment to improve accountability for violations of children’s rights in conflict. This is significant as often civilian protection policies focus on protection during the conflict, with less attention and more political wrangling surrounding holding perpetrators of violations to account afterwards. However, we know that holding perpetrators to account means children are better protected in the future. Such support for accountability in UK foreign policy also gives a mandate to support and strengthen international mechanisms for accountability – including efforts to monitor, collect and preserve evidence of grave violations against children that can later be used to prosecute those that committed crimes against children and their families. It therefore also acts as a deterrence for others committing violations against children, and helps enhance international norms that it is never acceptable to commit crimes against children during conflict.
Third, the specific inclusion of children ensures the recognition that conflict affects children differently and requires specific approaches to ensure they are kept safe. It helps mainstream this lens across government policy and practice and shifts how government views children in conflict within their civilian protection agenda by considering them in their overall approach.
Placing children at the centre of efforts to enhance protection of populations affected by conflict will make for more effective interventions and, crucially, in highlighting the needs of children, set a leading example for other states.
What next?
This updated approach is critical in laying the foundation for the government’s policies and operations on civilian protection. But for it to result in meaningful protection for children and their families, implementation, meaningful reviews and accountability for these commitments are critical.
The first opportunity to do this will be in the newly formed Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s (FCDO) forthcoming Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy. The updated approach to protecting civilians in armed conflict must be embedded in the outcome of this review. It should be accompanied by a clear accountability framework for its implementation that would allow the government to report its findings transparently and conduct regular reviews.
This publication is a significant win for committing UK policy and practice to ensure children are safe and protected. But our mission does not end here. We look forward to working with the FCDO in delivering these commitments to ensure that children all over the world are protected from the horrors of war.
Protect children in conflict