Sir, - It is established that over 300,000 children under the age of 18 are serving as combatants in some 30 countries. This is a global scandal. International law, defined by the Geneva Convention in 1949, the protocols of 1977 and 1989 conventions on "The Rights of the Child" have been woefully inadequate in protecting children from the horrors of war.
The root of the problem is that international law has laid down the minimum age for recruitment into armed forces at 15. But 18 is the normal age marking the end of childhood as defined in the near universally ratified Convention on the Rights of the Child, and is also the voting age in the vast majority of nations.
Children of 11 or 12 can easily be passed off as 15, while it would be much more difficult to pass them off as 18.
According to Human Rights Watch and UNICEF, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a ruthless revolutionary group of rebels which has struggled for 10 years to overthrow the Ugandan government, has between 6,000 and 12,000 child soldiers.
The same research shows that during 1998 a new wave of violence in Sierra Leone resulted in the forced recruitment of thousands of children into the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and the Armed Forces of Revolutionary Council (AFRC), both rebel forces. Children were given mind-altering drugs and firearms and forced to commit atrocities.
This abuse is widespread and a UN working group which proposed raising the age of recruitment and participation in armed conflict from 15 to 18 did not find enough support from certain countries during a key meeting in February 1998. - Yours, etc., Norman Fitzgerald,
CSSp, Executive Director, Refugee Trust, Stillorgan, Co Dublin.