About the author(s):
Rocco Blume is the Head of Policy and Advocacy at the War Child Alliance where he leads a global team of advocates tackling child recruitment, supporting young people to advocate for their own rights and championing essential services in conflict settings. He works with domestic and international politicians, policymakers, and influencers to push for greater support and accountability for children affected by conflict across the world. Rocco is co-chair of Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict, chair of Action on Armed Violence, and he holds an LLM in International Law from the University of Lancaster.
Samantha Holmes is a Research Associate at the Centre for Applied Human Rights (CAHR) and York Law School. She is also a member of the Beyond Compliance Consortium’s research programme “Building Evidence on Promoting Restraint by Armed Actors”. Her ongoing research explores the impacts of war on mental wellbeing and the vulnerabilities of children in war. She has also collaborated with Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict to research grave violations against children. Samantha holds an LLM in International Human Rights Law and Practice from the University of York, and an LLB from Queen Mary University of London. Before commencing her research into law and armed conflict, she built her early career in human rights law practice for non-governmental organisations in Southeast Asia, specialising in civil and political rights, legal analysis, UN advocacy, and the Cambodian context.
This post forms part of the Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to Prevent Harm and Need in Conflict, featured across Articles of War and Armed Groups and International Law. The introductory post can be found here. The symposium invites reflection on the conceptualisation of negative everyday lived experiences of armed conflict, and legal and extra-legal strategies that can effectively address harm and need.
The Children and Armed Conflict (CAAC) agenda is one of the most significant UN initiatives for the prevention and reduction of harm and need in war. A central tenet of the CAAC agenda is holding States and non-State armed groups accountable, on the global stage, for their infliction of harm on children to initiate behaviour change by acting as a deterrent and encouraging restraint from violence. This blog post will explore the tools the CAAC agenda has at its disposal, the successes of the CAAC agenda as an accountability mechanism, as well as some of the barriers this agenda faces. Through this evaluation we seek to inform the strengthening of the mandate in order to bolster its protection of children.
In the post-Cold War flush of optimism in the early 1990s, the attention of the UN turned to addressing the humanitarian and human rights consequences of the many brutal civil wars that had flourished in this period. Conflicts in Sudan, Rwanda, Haiti and Bosnia among others, spurred the UN Security Council to adopt a human rights component to its agenda, and introduced the regular condemnation of human rights and international humanitarian law violations, especially against vulnerable groups, including children, women and refugees. In 1994, UN Secretary General Boutros-Boutros Ghali, commissioned Mozambican politician and child rights expert, Graça Machel, to lead the study on the ‘means to ensure effective protection of children in war’. The subsequent report released in 1996, entitled, ‘The Impact of War on Children’, presented the multiple physical, psychological and social impacts of conflict on children. Acting on the recommendations of this report, in 1997 the UN General Assembly approved the creation of the Office of the Special Representative to the Secretary General on Children and Armed Conflict.
The grave violations and norm entrepreneurship, but what is missing?
The inception of the CAAC agenda in the 1990s saw the UN take on the role of ‘norm entrepreneurship’, resetting the boundaries of what is considered acceptable, encouraging the emergence of new norms at the Security Council and across member states and ensuring that actors who consistently violate children’s rights in conflict are held accountable. In 1999 the UN Security Council adopted its first resolution on children and armed conflict. In this resolution and its subsequent 12 thematic resolutions on the topic, it identified six ‘grave violations’ against children in times of armed conflict: killing and maiming, sexual violence, abduction, recruitment and use, attacks on schools and hospitals, and the denial of humanitarian assistance.
The norms associated with the six grave violations governing the treatment of children in armed conflict have since proceeded through a ‘lifecycle’. The initial decade of the CAAC agenda was a period of norm ‘emergence’ which then gave way to norm ‘acceptance’ as the mechanisms created under the CAAC agenda—including a crucial monitoring and reporting mechanism (MRM) for the systematic gathering of accurate, timely, objective and reliable information on the six grave violations—began to impact the behaviour of armed actors. The last decade has seen perhaps the final stage whereby the norms around child protection in armed conflict have acquired a ‘taken-for-granted’ quality and are no longer a matter of public debate. Even while last year saw the highest number of grave violations against children since the MRM was created, the very fact that there is now a robust and credible system tracking violations and assigning responsibility is a worthy achievement.
Despite the impressive progress of embedding norms for child protection, the material scope of the CAAC agenda’s six grave violations is narrow. The norms centre the direct and physical impacts of war. Although the inclusion of attacks on schools and hospitals as well as the denial of humanitarian access illustrates an important progression to extended protections to harms that occur as an indirect result of actions of conflict, the norms largely overlook reverberating harms. Equally, many profound harms that war inflicts on children are absent from the grave violations, for example no degree of mental or emotional harm caused by war is included, nor is detention unless it amounts to abduction, displacement, loss of parents and erosion of the family unit, reverberating effects of infrastructural impacts on water and sanitation, nor increased human trafficking. While operational and financial constraints may limit the capacity of the CAAC agenda to monitor and report on all these harms to children, by limiting itself to only six grave violations, the CAAC agenda has established a hierarchy of harm to children which has inadvertently deprioritised all other harms. Therefore, the accountability achieved by the CAAC agenda is fettered to accountability for the narrow scope of harms governed, leaving many actions that result in severe harm to children unaccounted for.
The efficacy of accountability through the “list of shame”
One tool of the CAAC agenda is the Secretary-General’s annual report on CAAC which publicly identifies States and armed actors that have committed grave violations against children. The report concludes with an annex listing the parties responsible for a pattern of grave violations involving multiple victims—the so-called “list of shame”. This list is based on UN verified data collected through the MRM.
The Secretary-General’s 2024 report listed, among others, the armed forces of Israel, Myanmar and Somalia and armed groups including the Islamic State group, Al-Shabaab and Al-Qaida. For a State to be included on a list with armed groups renowned for cruelty and transgressing basic international norms is an indication of its slippage from the international mainstream. The “list of shame” is thus a powerful naming and shaming mechanism that holds perpetrators to account in the public and political sphere. It operates as a catalyst for behaviour change and incentivises armed actors to engage with the UN Office on CAAC to develop remedial actions that will see them removed from the list. Some examples of armed actors who improved their protection of children as a result of being listed, ultimately resulting in their delisting, include: the armed forces of Ivory Coast (delisted in 2006), the Ugandan Peoples Defence Forces (delisted in 2008), and armed groups in Sri Lanka and Nepal (delisted in 2012).
Nevertheless, the list of shame as an avenue for accountability, has its limitations. The efficacy of naming and shaming is contested with some studies indicating that it can have the opposite of its intended effect and actually lead to an increase in violations and others evidencing that it can incite internal violence or rebellion which in turn can increase State violations. The effectiveness of the CAAC agenda’s naming and shaming efforts has received contradictory evaluations, with some studies finding a lack of a convincing causal link between the “list of shame” and the desired deterrence and legal compliance, while others evidencing increased compliance for State actors, but not for non-State armed groups.
Another barrier that hinders accountability through the CAAC listing of perpetrators is the politicisation of its implementation which has been widely critiqued. For example, the Saudi-led coalition listed in the report in 2016 for grave violations committed in Yemen were immediately and prematurely delisted the same year after Saudi Arabia reportedly threatened to withdraw financial support to the UN. Additionally, although the Israeli Defence Forces were listed for the first time in 2024 for grave violations committed in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, their omission from the list in previous years was widely critiqued as they were consistently one of the highest perpetrators of grave violations against children. These examples illustrate how politicisation has eroded the credibility of the listing and delisting process.
The unequal enforcement of the “list of shame” is also apparent in the absence of some of the most powerful States from the list despite their complicity or direct perpetration of grave violations. For example, US-led international forces in Afghanistan were omitted from the list in 2019 despite causing at least 286 verified child casualties.
The inconsistencies in the listing and delisting decisions means that the “list of shame” only provides accountability for the harm that some but not all children experience in conflict. Children, irrespective of the political power or influence of their government, deserve equal protection. To be effective and credible, the UN’s CAAC agenda must be uniformly and objectively applied to support all children across the world without political influence.
In addition to its functionality as an accountability mechanism the “list of shame” also instigates other actions in pursuit of the protection of children in conflict. For example, it triggers enhanced in-country monitoring through the MRM; it prompts scrutiny of the situation of grave violations against children by the Security Council’s Working Group on CAAC who also adopt conclusions on each conflict context containing recommendations to various actors for the protection of children; and it facilitates direct engagement through a dialogue between the UN and listed parties in order to map steps for ceasing and preventing grave violations. Indeed, the UN has worked with 31 listed armed actors to create 38 Action Plans; many of which have been implemented and led to parties being delisted. Recent research by Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict has illustrated a reduction in grave violations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Philippines after the relevant parties were listed and in line with the successful implementation of Action Plans. Even for those groups that have not yet completed Action Plans, the existence of this process provides a framework for them to take responsibility, be exposed to their failings and perceive the possibility of ending grave violations. Furthermore, most Action Plans have been signed with armed groups, therefore providing a credible mechanism for non-State actors to engage in accountability while they are typically barred from accessing State-centric rights mechanisms.
Beyond the law
The CAAC agenda is a political and not a legal mandate that is not tethered to a legal compliance approach and as such much of the limits and critiques of a compliance-based approach are avoided. Instead, the tools of the CAAC agenda operate through the frame of restraint, though it does not limit itself to restraint from legal violations, rather restraint from violence without legal qualification. The CAAC mandate refrains from making legal assessments. It does not analyse whether the circumstances amount to an armed conflict and thus whether international humanitarian law is applicable. Neither does it distinguish between harms inflicted through lawful or unlawful use of force. For example, killing and maiming by armed actors are recorded irrespective of whether the action was intended, proportional incidental harm, or disproportional incidental harm. Despite being underpinned by bedrock principles of international humanitarian law, international human rights law, and international criminal law, “grave violations” themselves do not align perfectly with international legal norms. Therefore, despite the name “grave violations”, the CAAC mandate embodies a wider approach of restraint from violence, not violations. It could be argued then that in many ways the CAAC agenda looks beyond the law and provides tools for reducing the suffering of children that are not tied to legal parameters.
Concluding observations
The CAAC agenda continues to champion the protection of children and serves as a crucial part of the international infrastructure for harm and need reduction in conflict. The observations of this blog post hope to shed light on areas where the CAAC mandate can be further strengthened to ensure it maintains its credibility and is implemented uniformly. This post also serves to encourage the continued evolution of the agenda in light of changing conflict contexts, increased awareness of the harm and need children experience in war, and what children themselves perceive as priorities.