Calls to stop military recruitment of children
Quakers welcome calls for the UK to stop recruiting children into the armed forces
Quakers have welcomed calls from United Nations (UN) child rights experts for the UK to stop recruiting children into the armed forces.
The UK is the only country in Europe to recruit sixteen-year-olds into the military, a practice shared with only sixteen other nations, and long campaigned against by Quakers.
The United Nations Child Rights Committee has recommended that the UK government raises the age of recruitment to eighteen and prohibits targeting of children in military advertising.
The call came in response to the committee’s latest findings on the UK’s implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Other recommendations on 2 June include that children should not have to serve a minimum period longer than those who enlist as adults, and should have the right to leave the armed forces with no notice.
In its regular review of states party to the Child Rights Convention, the committee also expressed concerns over the impact of the UK’s Illegal Migration Bill on children, urging the UK government to repeal draft provisions which would criminalise all asylum-seeking refugee children and prevent unaccompanied children from reuniting with their families.
Britain Yearly Meeting has already called for the bill to be scrapped on the grounds that it ‘effectively bans asylum, extinguishing the right to seek refugee protection in the UK’.
The committee also said it was ‘concerned that children as young as 10 or 12 are held criminally responsible, that children who are 16 and 17 years old are not always treated as children […] and that legislation allows for life imprisonment of children’.
Quaker concerns for global peace and justice are represented at the UN by the Quaker United Nations Office, which celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary this year.
Past successes include putting children with parents in prison on the UN agenda, and the international ban on child soldiers, as well as work on climate change, landmines and peacebuilding.
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