Justice for Children Part 1: Progress Made, Gaps Remaining

[Maria Immacolata Fico is a research collaborator at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.

Juliette Graf is a scientific associate (research and outreach) at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.]

This is the first of two posts from a November 2024 roundtable in Geneva on accountability for children in armed conflict. Part 1 examines progress and persistent gaps. Part 2 explores what justice actually means to children – and what must change to deliver it.

At a moment when demands for accountability for children in armed conflict have become impossible to ignore, a group of leading experts gathered in November 2025 in the Salle Antonio Cassese – a room carrying the legacy of one of international criminal justice’s most influential figures. Their task was as straightforward as it was daunting: to ask how the many actors involved – states, international and regional bodies, accountability mechanisms, and civil society – can finally turn their commitments into meaningful practice for children harmed by war.

Held under the Chatham House Rule, the expert meeting “Advancing Justice for Children: Progress, Gaps, and Future Directions for Accountability” was co-hosted by Save the Children, the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Leiden University. It convened leading voices from UN agencies, accountability institutions, civil society organisations, and scholars who work daily on the front lines of these questions.

The timing was not incidental. Four years have passed since a similar gathering inspired the 2021 report Advancing Justice for Children: Innovations to strengthen accountability for violations and crimes affecting children in conflict, produced by Save the Children and the Oxford Programme on International Peace and Security at the Blavatnik School of Government’s Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict (ELAC). This new meeting was an opportunity – and perhaps a reckoning to ask whether, after all this time, children living through armed conflict are any closer to the justice they have been promised.

A full expert report with detailed recommendations will follow in March 2026. In the meantime, this blog post highlights the key insights that emerged from these candid and sometimes difficult conversations: What progress has truly been made? Where do the gaps persist? And what would it take to deliver justice that actually responds to children’s needs – not in principle, but in practice?

The Progress

Before turning to the familiar and unfamiliar challenges, it was time to recognize that some progress had indeed been made. This shared recognition set a constructive tone for assessing how far the field has moved since 2021. 

For years, accountability for crimes against children in armed conflict meant one thing: prosecuting their recruitment as child soldiers. This narrow focus made sense from a legal standpoint – recruitment was clearly defined, relatively straightforward to prove, and fit neatly into existing war crimes frameworks. But it left vast categories of harm invisible: children forced to witness their parents’ execution, denied education as a weapon of war, or born of conflict-related rape.

One recurring example highlighted during the meeting was the International Criminal Court’s 2023 Policy on Children and Child-Related Crimes, which several participants described as a turning point. The Policy does something conceptually powerful: it reframes children not as passive victims but as rights-holders under international criminal law, with agency and dignity. Perhaps most importantly for practitioners, it dismantles a longstanding barrier – the misconception that investigating crimes against children necessarily requires interviewing child victims. By clarifying that evidence can come from multiple sources (parents, teachers, medical professionals, community documentation), the Policy removed an excuse that had historically deterred prosecutors from prioritizing these cases. The policy’s impact is becoming visible in jurisprudence. The Ongwen judgment demonstrated concrete progress: children born of rape were recognized as direct victims entitled to reparations, and children who witnessed violence against their parents were found to have suffered “outrage upon personal dignity”, expanding the legal understanding of harm beyond physical injury. Recent arrest warrants are recognizing crimes that specifically target children: unlawful deportation, forced witnessing of violence, and persecution through attacks on education. These aren’t the traditional child soldier cases – they represent a broader, more accurate understanding of how conflict harms children.

This was described as the policy becoming operational rather than merely aspirational, moving the needle for international law. Institutionally, OHCHR’s Human Rights Inquiries Branch now includes a dedicated child rights specialist position. Since 2018, Justice Rapid Response has deployed 18 child rights experts to 12 UN-mandated investigations, with participants noting that OHCHR is now systematically requesting child rights expertise. OHCHR’s updated manual on human rights monitoring now includes comprehensive guidance on investigating child rights violations, providing standardized approaches to age-disaggregated data collection and safe and ethical safeguards when engaging with children. Geneva-based mechanisms have produced practical guidelines and online courses for investigators deploying to crisis areas. These trauma-informed, child-sensitive materials, designed for non-specialists, are being integrated into pre-deployment training and field missions. Many experts pointed to the “child and youth-friendly” documentation initiatives developed to ensure children’s voices are heard safely while providing non-child rights experts with the sensitivity to identify child-related harm. 

Legal frameworks have also strengthened, reinforcing the importance of the rule of law in accountability efforts. The new ICRC 2025 Commentary to the Fourth Geneva Convention has updated Article 24 and Article 50, the latter clarifying that occupying powers bear a positive duty to safeguard a child’s cultural identity, national identity, education, and psychological well-being. This clarification gives legal force to efforts challenging practices that weaponize education or attempt to erase children’s cultural belonging.

Participants also noted rising political recognition: recent UN resolutions in both the Human Rights Council and General Assembly recommend incorporating child-specific language in accountability mechanisms, signaling that child rights are becoming an expected, not exceptional, element of international justice. This normative shift, while gradual, is not insignificant.

The field has matured: the question is no longer whether children should be part of accountability efforts, but how to make that inclusion systematic and effective.

Where the System Still Fails

One participant captured the paradox starkly: “You cannot look at your phone without seeing photos of children” affected by conflict, yet, “there’s been pretty much very little effort” toward accountability. Political will remains largely absent. If everyone agrees children deserve justice, why does implementation remain so difficult? The barriers are structural, conceptual, and built into how modern conflict itself has evolved.

As a first barrier, the threats against the international rule of law, sanctions against the International Criminal Court and UN individuals, combined with the resources crisis facing multilateral institutions, are very concerning. The resource crisis makes child-specific expertise incredibly precarious. An OHCHR representative explained that investigative bodies are operating at a maximum of 60% of their mandated capacity. Within this scarcity, specialized roles related to child rights are often the first to disappear. Child rights expertise remains vested in individual positions rather than embedded in institutional practice – when experts leave, their knowledge disappears with them. Participants described this not as a temporary setback, but as a systemic failure that weakens the entire accountability ecosystem. The field has expertise, but without institutional embedding, every budget cut erases years of accumulated knowledge.

The second barrier is “stranded evidence”: information gathered on children’s rights violations that cannot be translated into prosecutable cases. Information exists across databases and sources, but datasets rarely align in methodology because different actors collected them for different purposes. Humanitarian actors document for protection; UN agencies for reporting; NGOs for advocacy. Information gathered by humanitarian organizations seldom meets the evidentiary standards needed for legal proceedings, while prosecutors often lack the contextual understanding of how violations affect children. The domestic law problem compounds this. In many jurisdictions, sexual violence is defined too narrowly, recruitment and attacks on schools aren’t criminalized, and some systems require corroboration that renders a child’s testimony insufficient alone. When national law doesn’t recognize crimes against children, “it breaks the chain of cooperation, leaving accountability literally hanging between systems.” Access constraints intensify the challenge – Myanmar, Gaza, and other contexts deny investigators entry, forcing reliance on remote documentation with its own verification and ethical challenges. Whether through legal gaps, access barriers, or fragmented documentation, the result is the same: a fractured system that records pieces of truth but rarely assembles them into justice.

In addition to structural and resource limitations, there are deeper conceptual barriers that continue to shape practice. Stigmatisation language seeps into procedural laws through corroboration requirements based on assumptions about children’s reliability. Investigators ask questions framed around adult experiences of harm, leaving children’s perspectives unexamined. The psychological trauma of witnessing violence, the loss of parents, denial of education, the slow erosion of safety and identity – these rarely appear in formal documentation. As one expert observed, “The field still speaks in adult language, and therefore hears only adult stories.” – a mindset that shapes everything from who gets hired to what questions get asked to what testimony is believed.

Following, there is the reparations gap. One participant’s assessment was blunt: “We’re failing children massively in terms of reparations, both individual and collective, symbolic and material. We’ve not even started, really.” The field focuses overwhelmingly on prosecution, yet reparations are often more meaningful to survivors – material support, symbolic recognition, collective healing. What innovative approaches exist remain isolated pilots rather than systematic practice, leaving the vast majority of child survivors without repair.

Finally, modern conflict is creating harms that accountability mechanisms weren’t designed to address. Education is being weaponized systematically through ideological indoctrination and erasure of cultural identity. These practices represent deliberate strategies of control, an assault not just on the child’s body but on their identity and sense of self. The digital domain adds a new layer of harm: coerced imagery, online propaganda, and the permanent circulation of abuse create forms of trauma that endure indefinitely. Participants spoke of the “permanence of digital harm” and the urgent need to develop norms of digital dignity and rights to erasure. Corporate accountability for such harms remains underdeveloped, with existing frameworks lacking binding force.Even as mechanisms evolve, the gap between visibility and accountability persists. Children suffering are visible everywhere, and conflict itself is evolving faster than our frameworks, with digital harms and weaponized education creating new forms of trauma we’re not equipped to address. Structural barriers, fractured systems, and outdated mindsets prevent that visibility from translating into justice. Recognizing these gaps reveals what must change: a fundamental shift from justice for children to child-centered justice – accountability designed with, not merely for, those it aims to serve.