Newly Adopted Protocols to the Convention on the Rights of the Child

On May 25,2000, the United Nations General Assembly adopted by consensus two Protocols to the Convention on the Rights of the Child: the Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (Children in Armed Conflict Protocol) and the Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Pornography and Child Prostitution (Sale of Children Protocol).1 These instruments represent major advances in the international effort to strengthen and enforce norms for the protection of the most vulnerable children, who desperately need the world's attention. The Children in Armed Conflict Protocol deals realistically and reasonably with the difficult issues of minimum ages for compulsory recruitment, voluntary recruitment, and participation in hostilities. The Protocol raises the age for military conscription to eighteen from fifteen years, as stipulated under existing international law; obliges states parties to raise the minimum age for voluntary recruitment to an age above the current fifteen-year international standard; and requires states parties to take all feasible measures to ensure that personnel in their national armed forces who are not yet eighteen do not take a direct part in hostilities.