INTRODUCTION

Following the first codification of the prohibition against child recruitment in international law in the late 1970s, the global debate about the recruitment and use of children in armed conflicts took on a new level of importance two decades later. The 1990s marked the first decade of implementation of programmes to “rehabilitate” children who had been involved in armed conflicts.

The use of child soldiers is not a new phenomenon. Children have historically suffered disproportionately during war, and armed groups and forces have recruited children to serve in armed conflicts. But as international responses to providing for the recovery and reintegration needs of former child soldiers increased, the flow of information and awareness of this issue as a child rights violation led to a great deal of attention. As the focus intensified, approaches to ending the use of child soldiers evolved and diverged into separate actions by varying actors, not always consistently pulling in the same direction, yet all with the same aim in mind.

This book offers an approach to establishing a coherent synthesis that will contribute to further protection of the rights of children in armed conflicts, building on developments through the spring of 2015. Chapter 1 outlines the overall objectives and scope, and the framework of analysis, and provides an introduction to the issue of child recruitment and how it entered the international legal and political debates.

OBJECTIVE AND SCOPE

Transitional justice is the organizing framework for this work on child soldiers, and an overall objective is to identify ways to enhance the response to address child recruitment.

Since the 1980s, judicial and non-judicial approaches associated with a society's eff orts to come to terms with a legacy of abuses – the transitional justice mechanisms – have sought to address accountability, truth-seeking, institution building, and reconciliation and recovery among war-affected populations.