Children are deliberate targets of war, Amnesty International says

A third of the casualties of war in the past decade were under 18 years old, Amnesty International UK says in a new book on children in war. “Modern warfare is war against children” it said in a press release marking the publication of the book, ‘In the firing line’, on Monday. The book, launching a new campaign on human rights for children, was issued to coincide with a meeting in Geneva of the UN Working Group on the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The study outlines the extent to which children have increasingly become explicit targets in warfare. More and more are being deliberately killed, tortured and recruited as combatants. It says that 300,000 children are active combatants, 14 million children are refugees or displaced people and over a third of modern war casualties are estimated to be children. “Millions of children have seen what no human being should ever have to see. Hundreds of thousands have been forced to do things that not even a trained adult soldier should ever have to do. And every day countless numbers feel the agony, both physical and emotional, that most adults will never know,” says Rob Beasley, Campaign Co-ordinator for Amnesty International UK. The complete press release can be found on the Amnesty International UK website at http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news/index.html