Child Soldiers in Africa: A Global Approach to Human Rights Protection, Enforcement and Post-Conflict Reintegration

Abstract

Children have been recruited in more than 85 countries and have fought in approximately 36 conflicts across the globe. They have acted as combatants, mine testers, messengers and cooks. Some children have even been used as human shields or as sex slaves for military leaders. The conscription, recruitment and use of children in armed forces constitute one of the most egregious human rights violations due to the defenselessness of the victims. As former United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated in his 2000 Report on Children and Armed Conflict, ‘[children] depend, even more than adults do, on the protection afforded in peacetime by family, society and law’. The use of child soldiers encompasses not only human rights violations based on soldiering but also major concerns about child labour, abduction, forced prostitution and slavery. There are approximately 300,000 child soldiers in the world, with African nations largely considered the hardest hit by this practice. The civil wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Mozambique notoriously involved children in the conflict. But the crisis on