NAMUN2015 General Assembly SOCHUM SOCIAL, HUMANITARIAN AND CULTURE COMMITTEE Background Guide DEAR DELEGATES, Welcome to the 30th North American Model United Nations Conference. It is our sincere pleasure to welcome you to the General Assembly of the Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee (SOCHUM). Prior to proceeding to committee-specific details, the members of the Dais will be introduced. Nina Modaresi is delighted to serve as one of your chairs for this committee. She is in her last year at the University of Toronto, and hopes to pursue graduate studies in Public Policy and Governance. She is extremely passionate about international and humanitarian concerns, and has explored these subjects through her role as an editor for the Pre-Law Society’s Voir Dire. She looks forward to meeting the delegates, and making NAMUN 2015 a great success! Priya Soundranayagam is in her third year studying International Relations and History at the University of Toronto, and has a particular interest in the regions of South Asia and the Middle East. This is her first year of involvement with North American Model United Nations. She is very excited to welcome all the delegates to the Conference, and to serve as one of your chairs for this committee. Tea Cimini will serve as your moderator for this committee. She is a first year student at the University of Toronto, hoping to pursue a double major in International Relations and Peace, Conflict and Justice. This is her first year working with NAMUN, and she looks forward to contribute to create an intellectually challenging environment for her delegates while having a great time. Novera Khan is a sophomore at the University of Toronto, pursuing a double major in Economics and Political Science and a minor in Philosophy. This is her second year with NAMUN, having served as a Chair for the World Health Organization in 2014. She is honored to return as a Vice Director of the General Assemblies for the Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee this year. She looks forward to hearing innovative new perspectives on the topics to be discussed within this committee. 1 This year’s Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee will examine issues related to the military use of children in combat, and the implementation of Community Based teaching and learning as a means of education to provide immeasurable progress in areas of gender inequality and economic disparity. It shall undoubtedly be an exciting experience for all those who arrive with the intent to partake in stimulating discourse. We wish you the best of luck. Sincerely, Nina Modaresi Chair,Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee [email protected] Priya Soundranayagam Chair,Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee [email protected] Tea Cimini Moderator,Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee [email protected] Novera Khan Vice Director of the General Assemblies [email protected] 2 Background The third committee of the United Nations General Assembly, the Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Affairs Committee, is responsible for a variety of issues relating to, as the name would suggest, the social, humanitarian and human rights issues that affect people worldwide. Under this umbrella fall the issues of the advancement of women, the treatment of refugees and the promotion of fundamental freedoms among other concerns. Being merely a committee of the General Assembly, SOCHUM carries with it only the powers of recommendation and not legislation; their recommendations however can be meaningful in their ability to reflect customary law and to guide the discourse around future decisions that are more binding legally. A particularly important objective of SOCHUM is the protection of children, and so the topic at hand is quite pertinent: the recruitment and use of children for military purposes.1 According to international law, a child soldier is defined as any combatant under the age of eighteen.2 Not only is it illegal to recruit children under the age of eighteen, it is in fact a war crime to recruit those under the age of fifteen. SOCHUM’s mandate for the protection of children can also be broadened in scope to include preventing violence against children in general. For the purposes of our discussion, however, we will narrow our definition to the recruitment and use of child soldiers under the age of eighteen for an explicitly military purpose. Although it is hard to pinpoint exact figures, it is estimated that children currently serving as involuntary recruits for military purposes worldwide number in the hundreds of thousands – one source puts this number at 300 000 children embroiled in conflicts at this moment.3 Their ages vary, some as young as eight, and both boys and girls are implicated in this violence. The causes for which they are recruited are diverse: government forces, paramilitaries, civil militia and armed opposition groups.4 The purposes for which they are recruited are equally diverse. Many fight on the frontlines, while some act as spies, messengers, lookouts or mere servants. Some are forced to participate in suicide missions, or to lay/clear 1 “Social, Humanitarian & Cultural: Third Committee,” General Assembly of the United Nations, accessed December 15, 2014, http://www.un.org/en/ga/third/ 2 “From Cradle to War,” Child Soldiers, accessed December 15, 2014, http:// www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/children-s-rights/child-soldiers 3 Aryeh Neier, introduction to Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go to War, ed. Jimmie Briggs (New York: Basic Books, 2005), vii. 4 “Children and Human Rights,” Amnesty International, accessed December 15, 2015, http://www.amnesty.org/en/children 3 landmines.5 While both boys and girls fall victim to this, girls specifically are sold into sexual slavery and are at a particular risk of rape and sexual abuse.6 These children are seen as a cheap and unlimited resource, and it is in some cases a form of indoctrination and militarization for authoritarian regimes.7 All evidence indicates that there are very few occasions in which children choose to be recruited of their own volition. For a great majority, there is no choice. They are abducted or brought into the fold by force.8 Those that ostensibly join voluntarily do so most likely out of coercion (i.e. threats to their family). Others join out of desperation, for lack of an alternative lifestyle, with many joining to find individual security – especially in “countries without perceptible prospects of personal development”.9 Under SOCHUM’s purview, the prevention of such a climate of instability that would compel children to make this choice is as unwanted as explicit coercion, and both are to be prevented. The importance of addressing this issue hardly needs to be stated – the affected children are exposed to terrible dangers, as well as physical and psychological trauma. To name a few examples, the trauma underwent by child soldiers forced through hard marching can deform their spines; they can be exposed to malnourishment due to lack of food and skin diseases from exposure to weather. Those who are either forced or choose to have sexual relations with older soldiers face the risk of contracting STDs. 10 These children are robbed of their childhood and their lives thereafter are forever affected by their experience. The issue has come to the forefront of human rights advocacy in the past three or four decades and numerous organizations have sprung up with the express purpose of preventing the use and recruitment of child soldiers. Despite these efforts, the problem has not diminished and intrastate conflicts increasingly employed such tactics worldwide, the most recent example being the troubling developments in the Middle East and the recruitment of child soldiers by ISIS.11 The failure of these efforts can in some 5 “Child Soldiers,” Human Rights Watch, accessed December 15, 2014, http:// www.hrw.org/node/112941 6 “Children and Human Rights”, Amnesty International. 7 Alexandre J. Vautravers, “Why Child Soldiers are Such a Complex Issue,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 27, no. 4 (December 2008): 102. 8 Human Rights Watch. 9 Vautravers, Alexandre J. “Why Chidl Soldiers Are Such a Complex Issue”, Refugee Survey Quarterly (Vol. 27, No. 4), 2009. 10 James Marten, “Introduction,” in Children and War: A Historical Anthology, ed. James Marten (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 4-5. 11 Kate Brannen, “Children of the Caliphate,” Foreign Policy, October 24 2014. 4 cases be attributed to the problem of international campaigns exacerbating youth-based recruitment. Experts warn of the complications that can arise when these campaigns uncritically apply a Western understanding of children to non-Western settings.12 In this report, we will first outline the historical development of this phenomenon, and how it came to into the purview of the United Nations. Consulting the international organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as sources from the United Nations itself, we will then address the current state of affairs. This will be done on a regional basis, highlighting certain countries that have failed to comply with international law, both historically and in the present. Finally, we will conclude with an overview of attempts made by states to rehabilitate and reintegrate former child soldiers into society. Historical Overview The history of the use of children in warfare can be traced back to pre-modern Europe, during which the use of child soldiers was in fact quite common. In societies where many children were abandoned to fend for themselves, one of the only options available to them was to join a regiment, which would provide them with a steady source of employment. Younger children of large families were also often sent to join the regiments as an attempt by families to pay “their debt” to society, increasing the manpower of the state’s defenses.13 With the passage of time however, the lives of these children became more regulated, especially given the introduction of mandatory primary education.