"Business as usual" for child soldiers

The NGO Refugees International (RI) has called for leaders of groups that employ child soldiers to be declared war criminals and prosecuted as such by the International Criminal Court. In a report published on 1 April highlighting the plight of child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), RI said that despite UN Security Council resolutions and international protocols prohibiting the recruitment and use of child soldiers, there had been too little progress in eliminating this form of child abuse in the DRC. Resolution 1460 of January 2003 points out that the conscription or enlistment of children under the age of 15 is classified as a war crime by the Rome statute of the ICC. An annex to the resolution listed 23 military units in five countries that trained child soldiers, 10 of which were in the DRC. RI reported that during a visit to North Kivu and Orientale (provinces in the DRC) in February, it found that "children armed by the different groups dotted cities and towns". RI called on the Security Council to continue to research and publish the names of armed groups that employ child soldiers and actively work to create Council's consequences for groups that do. "In the DRC, all the armed groups use child soldiers, recruited either forcibly or through the lure of escaping abject poverty," RI reported.