The Law of War

Mercenaries
Under Article 47 of Protocol I (Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949,
and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts) it is stated in
the first sentence "A mercenary shall not have the right to be a combatant or a prisoner
of war".
On 4 December 1989 the United Nations passed resolution 44/34 the International
Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries. It
entered into force on 20 October 2001 and is usually known as the UN Mercenary
Convention. Article 2 makes it an offence to employ a mercenary and Article 3.1 states
that "A mercenary, as defined in article 1 of the present Convention, who participates
directly in hostilities or in a concerted act of violence, as the case may be, commits an
offence for the purposes of the Convention".
Child Soldiers
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 38, (1989)
proclaimed: "State parties shall take all feasible measures to ensure that persons who
have not attained the age of 15 years do not take a direct part in hostilities".
In a 2003 briefing for the 4th UN Security Council open debate on children and armed
conflict by Human Rights Watch they state in their introduction that:
In recent years progress has been made in developing a legal and policy framework for
protecting children involved in armed conflict. The Optional Protocol to the Convention
on the Rights of the Child on children in armed conflict, which came into force in
February 2002, prohibits the direct use of any child under the age of 18 in armed conflict
and prohibits all use of under-18s by non-state armed groups. By mid-December 2003,
67 states had ratified the Optional Protocol, including seven mentioned in this report
(The seven are: Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Philippines, Rwanda,
Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka and Uganda). The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child
had begun examining governments’ reports on steps taken to implement the Protocol.
[Articles 8(2)(b)(xxvi), (e)(vii) [26] of] the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court
(1998) defines the recruitment of children under the age of 15 as a war crime.
On 26 July 2005, the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed UN Security
Council Resolution 1612, the sixth in a series of resolutions about children and armed
conflict. Resolution 1612 established the first comprehensive monitoring and reporting
system for enforcing compliance among those groups using child soldiers in armed
conflict.
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