This January the Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict (Watchlist) and Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) convened a policy workshop on “children and armed conflict” (CAAC). The tenth such workshop since 2013, the event aimed to bring together international policymakers for candid, closed-door discussions on the implementation of the UN Security Council’s CAAC agenda.
The creation of the CAAC agenda over 25 years ago signalled a new era of global commitment to preventing grave violations against children in armed conflicts and holding perpetrators to account. However, with a total of 468 million children currently living in conflict zones, much more still needs to be done to galvanise commitments to protecting children in conflict.
This much has been made brutally stark by the events of the past four months in Israel and the Gaza Strip, where children have paid the highest price for decisions of adults. Indeed, the first UN Security Council Resolution to be agreed in lieu of the conflict in November (UNSCR 2712) was very much focused on the plight of children and was welcomed by the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for CAAC (SRSG-CAAC).
She heralded the Resolution as the first step in the right direction to ensure the protection of children during armed conflict and to prevent grave violations against them.
She went on - “The international community must learn to value peace more than conflict and must put its energy into the peaceful resolution of the underlying conflict. Violence is a human construct and so is peace. Let us bring peace to all our children now. Children from Israel and the State of Palestine deserve a life free from fear and violence”.
Yet as the Watchlist workshop met in New York children in Israel and the Gaza Strip appear no closer to peace with the conflict taking an ever-heavier toll on them.
Meanwhile the overall trends in regard to children and armed conflict continue to head the wrong way – as documented in the excellent “Stop the War on Children” research series.
Over time, despite some fluctuations, there has been a steady increase in the number of children living in conflict zones. The number has more than doubled since the lowest estimates in the mid-1990s. So how can the CAAC agenda do more to meet the protection needs of so many children affected by conflict?
Unpacking the CAAC Agenda
There is a simple logic to how the CAAC agenda should work to protect children in theory that belies the complexity and inconsistency of its lived reality. Over the years the agenda has expanded and identified six of the worst abuses of children’s rights in conflict – described as “grave violations”:
1. Killing and maiming of children;
2. Recruitment or use of children as soldiers;
3. Sexual violence against children;
4. Abduction of children;
5. Attacks against schools or hospitals;
6. Denial of humanitarian access for children.
Balancing Successes and Challenges
Identifying these six grave violations should not of course belittle or cheapen the litany of other horrors that children may experience in conflict (child detention for instance), but they are an important starting point. The logic follows that if these grave violations are reported in a conflict context, they are identified in the annual report of the Secretary General that crucially includes an annex of “listed parties”.
This list, sometime referred to as the “list of shame”, should in theory trigger parties to a conflict (the majority historically have been non-state armed grounds) to agree “action plans” that include the practical steps needed to reduce or end the grave violations themselves. However, despite one speaker at the conference in New York explain that they are trying to “politics proof” the CAAC agenda there is a mismatch between evidence and listing.
As a Watchlist report from last year stated: “of particular concern are those inconsistencies found between the data on violations that are included in the narrative section of the annual report and the parties listed in its annexes”.
Navigating the Path Forward: We Need to Do Better, We Need to Do More
2023 saw the historic first listing of a member of the Security Council P5 with the Russian armed forces and affiliated armed groups listed in the context of the conflict in Ukraine. Yet this has not yet been followed up with an agreement on an action plan to commit to steps towards better protecting children and a delisting process.
This year will very likely see Israel and Palestinian armed groups listed and thus the hope is that all will agree action plans to see children better protected going forward. We are at a crossroads with multilateralism and the international order struggling against the backdrop of so many simultaneous crises. Yet such is the scale of the challenge it is more important than ever for the CAAC agenda to put children, not politics, first.
As one speaker said in New York; “we need to do better, we need to do more”.
