What international law prohibits the recruitment and use of child soldiers?
The 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions prohibit the recruitment or use of children under the age of 15 or their use in hostilities. The same provisions appear in the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been ratified by every country in the world except Somalia and the United States. The nearly universal recognition of the prohibition on recruiting or using child soldiers led governments to include it as a war crime under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court when the Rome Statute was agreed in 1998. In 2000, the United Nations adopted an Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict that sets 18 as the minimum age for any conscription, recruitment, or use of individuals in hostilities. The optional protocol permits government armed forces to recruit children on a voluntary basis from age 16, but does not allow their use in hostilities until they reach 18. To date, 126 gov
