Rights groups criticize US military recruitment, child detention in Iraq
E-Mail Article
Printer-Friendly
3-Column Format
Translate
Share Article
Text Size
GENEVA: The United States is failing to live up to its own commitments to protect children caught up in war, human rights groups said Wednesday.
The American Civil Liberties Union said U.S. military recruiters target children as young as 11, violating the terms of a global treaty on child rights that Washington signed up to six years ago.
Meanwhile, New York-based Human Rights Watch said U.S. forces in Iraq are holding hundreds of children in conditions that fail to meet international standards.
The charges come as the U.S. prepares to answer questions on its record Thursday from the U.N.'s Committee on the Rights of the Child.
Senior U.S. officials who will speak before the committee this week told reporters in Geneva on Wednesday that the United States fully complies with its obligations on military recruitment of minors.
Today on IHT.com
While thousands of American youngsters join cadet programs every year, formal recruitment does not occur until a person is at least 17, said Sandra Hodgkinson, deputy assistant secretary of defense.
Less than a tenth of new recruits are 17 when they join the military and every effort is made to keep them away from combat operations until they have reached 18, she said.
"Where they choose to make that choice at the age of 17, we have a very robust program to make sure that the family is very well involved in that decision," Hodgkinson said.
The ACLU argues that American parents are ill-informed about what options they have to prevent their children from being recruited into the military. Years of pressure applied by schools and retired officers to sign up amount to a violation of Washington's obligations under the treaty, the group says.
Hodgkinson also defended the practice of detaining minors in war zones.
In written answers submitted to the committee last week, the U.S. said it is holding about 500 juveniles in detention centers in Iraq, and has about 10 detained at a base in Afghanistan.
It says no minors are currently held at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, but that up to eight youths aged 13 to 17 have been held there in the past. The figure is challenged by rights groups and lawyers for some of the detainees, who say that dozens of juveniles have been held at Guantanamo.
Washington told the committee that it has held a total of 2,500 youths under the age of 18 since 2002, almost all in Iraq.
"When we do encounter children who have been recruited into the armed forces to take up hostilities in a dangerous environment, we do believe that it is important to remove them from that battlefield environment," Hodgkinson said.
Juveniles in Iraq were detained after planting explosive devices such as roadside bombs, she said, adding that nothing prevents the U.S. from holding individuals under 18.
Human Rights Watch said children detained in Iraq are not being treated appropriately for their age, and that the U.S. is breaking its own rules on how long they can be held.
Hodgkinson responded that the U.S. makes every effort to not detain a juvenile for more than a year. "We have developed ... a program that we believe attends to their special needs, and that more importantly the Iraqi government believes attends to their needs," she said.
The U.N. committee will question the U.S. about its compliance with two "optional protocols" — on children in armed conflict and on the sale of children — that the U.S. has committed itself to. They are separate from the broader, 1998 U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child that all nations in the world except the United States and Somalia have ratified.
Latest News
