التجريم الدولي لتجنيد الأطفال في النزاعات المسلحة

Abstract EN

The subject of prohibition and criminalization of soldiering and using children in armed international and national conflicts has an exceptional importance these days, due to its prevalence in the different conflict zones.

The UN has made great efforts to criminalize these acts, on two levels: the legislative level through International Conventions and Protocols, and the diplomatic level through the resolutions and recommendations made by its organs, with a view to eradicating this criminal phenomien in the entire world.

In this article we will focus on the roots of this phenomenon {g} since anitiquity, when the people of ancient civilizations used to be very proud of it.

Later, we will draw on the justifcations for enlisting children in armed conflicts by national armies and armed groups, and the definition of the child soldier according to jurists’ opinions.

Finally, we will discuss the enlisting and the use of children from a legal view on two levels: first, the international level by presenting the international treaties that criminalized the soldiering of children and the limits of such criminalization until it became an international crime under which individual criminal responsibility is categorized.

Second, the individual level: by explaining that individuals shall be subject to the most severe penalties before the national jurisdiction of the concerned state or before the international and international criminal courts that emerged in the last decade of the last century and the first of the twenty-first entury.