Enforcement and Implementation of The Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict

The human rights approach could be pivotal in laying the groundwork for mainstreaming human rights discourse in society, particularly in the main arteries of traditional power organs and structures — executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, media, and civil society, with children’s voice struggling to be a focal point to influence national policy directions. This discourse would facilitate the process of cross-fertilization of local norms, customs, and traditions with international human rights law and jurisprudence, rather than delimit the discourse within progressive quarters of civil society and government. Mainstreaming human rights could help counter the marginalization of child soldiers and children belonging to classes and sectors excluded from the main social discourse as carried out in the halls of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, as well as media. In the course of developing a critical rights discourse among members of the body politic in a manner that allows for children to assume, in a way, a vanguard role in policy formulation and political decision-making, human rights could serve as a framework for dissecting, analyzing, and critiquing the children in armed conflict phenomenon and other social ills.The rights discourse helps achieve people’s and children’s participation, public accountability and transparency in governance. By anchoring their own social movement on human rights tenets, the children and people can demand upon and hold their own state to account in fulfilling its obligation to respect, protect and fulfill their fundamental right to holistic and integrative development whose failure ignites armed conflict. This also cultivates the ground for the children’s assumption of leadership roles in the future. This is significant as the human rights paradigm as may be espoused by children in this discourse would help mold and define a human rights-based politics and governance in the future. This is why the involvement of all state and non-state actors, including the academe, in this discourse assumes a long-term significance inasmuch as government serves, supposedly, as the agency for carrying out the people’s collective will and promoting the common weal. This approach helps translate the international community’s rich human rights literature into the field of a people- and children-led social and political activism with human rights as both their guidepost and end goal.Who are the children who could, together with others, be at the forefront of this activism? Wounded children — street children, child rape survivors, child laborers, child torture survivors, and child detainees — could, among others, have a significant role to play in this children-propelled movement to address the phenomenon of children in armed conflict and other concomitant issues. Why such kids? Grassroots experiences in paralegal and human rights education among these children show the depth of wisdom and caring among them. The experiential approach characterizing such non-formal grassroots education complemented by international law — CRC in particular — proves to be a powerful moving force for children to aspire to achieve change in order to prevent and save other children from falling victim to similarly tragic encounters.In order to sustain this effort and gradually build a momentum for a children-propelled civil society movement among themselves, institutional support from civil society groups, concerned state and United Nations agencies, media, and community needs to be further entrenched. Agenda-setting by children themselves would help ensure that this initiative would not be diluted with and manipulated by certain vested interest groups. It is in this respect that the approach of Paulo Freire assumes importance as his radical pedagogy could preclude the left, right, and center political spectrums from exploiting them for certain self-seeking interests. Freire’s approach would enable the children and the community at large to find and claim their own true voice, to fully articulate their own needs, their own ethos, and to assert their own world views and interests, as contradistinguished especially from state actors who prove themselves to be quite beholden to the dictates of international foreign creditors.