"We are appalled at what is being done to children in the name of child soldiers," said Stephen Lewis, deputy executive director of UNICEF. "We are putting it quite explicitly that the recruitment of children into armed forces or groups under the age of 18 should be considered a war crime."

That stance, Lewis admitted, is a shift from UNICEF's previous prohibition of recruitment of child soldiers below the age of 15 in the 1991 Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been ratified by 191 nations. 

Three years ago, the UN agency shifted its policy to raise the minimum recruitment age to 18, a change reflected in an optional protocol to the Convention which has been accepted by roughly 80 nations present at Rome, according to Marta Santos Pais, UNICEF's director of evaluation, policy and planning.

More importantly, Santos Pais argued, recent conflicts and the abuse of children as both soldiers and victims in wartime have pushed nations to ask: "Are we happy with the minimum common denominator?"

Under three of the options to make recruitment of children a war crime before the ICC, the minimum recruitment age is 15, Santos Pais noted.

However, she contended, other nations - including Denmark and Sweden, which have pushed for 18 as the cut-off in the ICC committee now dicussing the topic - are gathering momentum to raise the age.

UNICEF estimates that there are at least a quarter of a million child soldiers serving in armies and militias around the world, from majors and lieutenants in the Liberian armed factions and former Sierra Leone junta forces to guerrillas in Sri Lanka's Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

"Our experience with child soldiers everywhere from Sierra Leone to the Democratic Republic of the Congo over the last number of years is further evidence that the phenomenon is growing, not abating," Lewis asserted.

Perhaps the worst example of the abuses these children face, Lewis said, is in Uganda, where the abduction and forced recruitment of children by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) was documented in a recent UNICEF-World Vision report.

One 14-year-old, Stephen K., said that the rebels who kidnapped him forced children to walk through thorny bush paths and swamps. "Children who got tired, sick or weak were just killed," he said.

"We were beaten quite a lot, and girls were forcefully married off to men who were cruel," 12-year-old Conse A. added. Other children talked of being drugged by captors and of seeing their parents killed.

The UN system has struck out against such abuses, and demanded that 18, not 15, be the minimum age under which nations cannot recruit soldiers. Former Mozambican Education Minister Graca Machel, in her recent UN report on children and armed conflict, emphasised the higher cut-off age.

Still, there remain hurdles in attaining that goal. Although Santos Pais argued that a "clear majority" of nations on the ICC working group have acceded to the optional protocol and its cut-off age of 18 years, many countries still provide military training for younger children.

Several nations, for example, allow 16- or 17-year-olds to be inducted into military academies, Lewis noted - setting up what could be political disputes over why the recruitment age should be higher than that. "What we are saying is that an application or admission to a school need not imply recruitment," Lewis said. At the same time, he argued, children below 18 should never be made to serve in any armed forces.

Olara Otunnu, the special UN envoy on children and armed conflict, urged the ICC delegates "to ensure that the best interest of, and maximum protection for, children affected by armed conflict will become guiding principles in the drafting of the (ICC) statute."

As part of that effort, Otunnu said, no-one below the minimum age of recruitment should be under the ICC's jurisdiction as potential war criminals.

"The ICC's basic function and purpose is to be punitive," Santos Pais said. "We doubt that it is the place to deal with children." Rather, she said, the focus should be on the adults who "manipulate" them to commit crimes.

"In a way, it's almost too easy to deal with criminality and forget the causes," Lewis said. "But you have to deal with the causes, or the problem will never end." Farhan Haq/IPS