Justice for Children Part 2: What Child-Centered Justice Requires

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

What Justice Actually Means for Children

The second session of the two-day roundtable began not with theory but with a story. One expert recounted meeting a mother and daughter in Eastern DRC who had survived rape; the younger sister had been raped and killed. The perpetrators, former members of armed groups, had been reintegrated into law enforcement and now served as local policemen. Several times a week, the family passed the police station on their way to the market, sometimes seeing the men who had harmed them. The mother’s question was direct: “Does that mean that the crimes that I have suffered, and my daughter has suffered, and my other daughter, who was killed, have suffered, are not worth it… that we don’t deserve justice?”

There is no “post-conflict” for this family. The violence isn’t past – it’s ongoing, visible and inescapable. This story framed the central question for the discussions: what does justice mean for children in contexts where harm continues and impunity is part of daily life?

The consensus was unequivocal: accountability must extend far beyond prosecution. For children, justice is not just about a criminal being sentenced; it is about their suffering being acknowledged and their lives being restored. Justice, as the discussion revealed, is both tangible, removing those who cause harm and deterring future violations, and intangible, encompassing the sense of security, but also restoration of dignity. It must flow through acknowledgement, repair, and restoration. Reparations, broadly conceived, must therefore sit at the heart of accountability.

Education emerged as an especially powerful form of reparation: trauma-informed schooling, rebuilding destroyed schools and guaranteed access to safe and quality learning environments can all restore dignity and hope. Education represents not just access to schooling but “the infrastructure of hope, the material foundation upon which children imagine themselves beyond the violence they have endured.”

Beyond education, participants described what children themselves identify as essential, findings that challenged adult assumptions. Consultations with over 800 children found they prioritized “the creation of safe spaces to play”. As one participant admitted: “For me, if I were to design a reparative measure, I’m not sure creation of safe spaces to play would be very high on the list.” However, safe spaces enable physical development, psychological recovery, social connection, and the exercise of fundamental rights. For Rohingya children, access to citizenship emerged as “the core form of justice” sought, the foundation without which no other right can be exercised. These examples demonstrate what one participant articulated: “Meaningful reparations must restore that possibility. They must give back not just what was lost, but what was hoped for.”

Visible and enduring reparations ground this abstract notion in lived reality. A school rebuilt where a massacre occurred, a community center named for children lost, justice is no longer an event taking place in a distant courtroom but rather the very social fabric being reconstructed. Acknowledgement and truth-telling were identified as crucial partners in the process. Public acknowledgment of wrongs, recording of children’s narratives, and symbolic actions like creating memorials or re-registering lost identities are some of the ways through which survivors could be granted the validation they seek. The healing through justice must be as extensive as the harm. The emotional and public wounds caused by wars must be addressed.

At the core of this vision is a change in the perception of children, from passive recipients of benefits to active agents of accountability. This shift requires rethinking not only outcomes but also processes. The active participation of children through different means, such as co-designing reparations, engaging in truth-telling activities, or reflecting on their lives in art, conversation, or testimony, was seen as both a right and a reparative act. However, genuine participation requires removing barriers. Even where reparations programs exist, children face impossible legal obstacles. In many jurisdictions, children lack legal standing to bring claims themselves, a fundamental barrier that precedes all others. Where participation is possible, they must obtain “legal status as a victim” through complaint processes designed for adults.

Unaccompanied children, orphans, and those without documentation cannot meet these thresholds. For participation to be meaningful, processes must be safe, welcoming, and specially designed according to children’s age, gender, and culture. An information gap compounds this. One expert described a pattern: states report that information about reparations is available online, in publications. But “when we ask the children, ‘Do you know that?’ very often, no, they don’t.” The discussion pointed to children in Colombia who had been denied education while associated with armed groups and, therefore, could not read the reparations materials supposedly available to them. Information exists, but it doesn’t reach children.  

This expanded understanding of justice also blurs the traditional boundaries between international and local systems. International mechanisms can set precedents and mobilize attention, but national courts and community-based initiatives remain the frontline of accountability. Many states still lack the legal provisions to prosecute crimes against children or require corroboration of child testimony, effectively silencing victims. The discussion emphasized that international stakeholders must collaborate with national counterparts to transform these legal frameworks and enhance complementarity, ensuring that accountability is rooted in communities’ understanding and needs. Local civil-society organizations, deeply embedded in the affected communities, play fundamental roles in ensuring engagement is ethical and effective. Participants described justice not as flowing in one direction but both upwards and downward, from community healing to international adjudication, each reinforcing the other. They repeatedly emphasised that accountability cannot be effective unless it resonates at the community level.

What would justice look like for the mother and daughter in DRC? Not just prosecuting the perpetrators, who have already been “reintegrated.” It would mean acknowledgment of what they survived. Safety that doesn’t require walking past their attackers. Community recognition of the harm done. Material support to rebuild their lives. Their younger sister’s memory is honored. This is what child-centered justice requires – not just punishment, but restoration of possibility.

What Must Be Strengthened

By the end of the meeting, the tone had shifted from analysis to resolution, and a shared direction emerged. These conversations underscored the need for creativity and persistence even within the current constraints, a theme that will inform the collective work moving forward. The gathering produced a set of detailed recommendations that will inform comprehensive formal guidance to be released in 2026. But participants converged on three fundamental transformations required across the accountability ecosystem.

From Rhetoric to Resources

Participants called for the systematic integration of child-rights expertise within every accountability mechanism, from leadership structures and investigative design to field training and reporting. This requires adopting a comprehensive children’s rights-based approach; one that views children not as incidental victims but as rights-holders whose protection and participation must shape every phase of accountability work. Child-centered approaches should not depend on goodwill or external advocacy; they should be built into the professional DNA of international justice. This requires, among other factors, political and financial support from member states to enable investigative and accountability efforts to have both a mandate and resources to integrate a child rights approach. Specialist positions must be protected as foundational rather than expendable, with clear requirements that leadership be vetted for child rights competency. Political will must translate into sustained financing, mandated positions, and accountability.

From Consultation to Co-creation

Accountability mechanisms must design child engagement as standard practice, not an exceptional circumstance. This requires moving beyond the model where one isolated child rights specialist carries the entire responsibility while other investigators proceed with adult-centric questions. Child-centered engagement methods must become systematic: creative formats, safe spaces, processes designed with rather than for children. This demands dedicated witness protection and psychosocial support. Precisely the positions often cut first during resource constraints, yet foundational to meaningful participation. 

From Fragmentation to Complementarity

Coordination mechanisms must be established to enable different actors, such as humanitarian organizations, UN agencies, NGOs and prosecutors, to share information using compatible standards. Civil society organizations should be positioned as co-leaders in accountability work since it is through grounding justice in context and culture that children’s reality is reflected in the system. Multidisciplinary partnerships must become standard: legal analysis enriched by psychosocial expertise, documentation informed by cultural competency. International mechanisms must collaborate with national counterparts to reform frameworks that currently silence children: implementing child-centred procedures, criminalizing violations, and eliminating corroboration requirements. National courts and community-based initiatives represent the frontline; international mechanisms can set precedents and mobilize attention, but sustainable justice is rooted in communities’ understanding and needs. 

As the session concluded, a quiet but unmistakable determination settled in the room. With multiple accountability mechanisms facing renewal and General Comment 27 on children’s access to justice under development, 2026 is shaping up to be a pivotal year. Emerging challenges add urgency: “The harm that children suffer in conflict will follow them, whether we like it or not, indefinitely. Images of abuse are online now… and it can live forever on the internet.” The challenge ahead is to harness digital technologies responsibly while creating legal pathways that allow victims to have exploitative imagery removed permanently from digital platforms. Children-centered justice cannot be postponed until the system’s conditions are flawless or generous budgets are available. It must be pursued within the constraints of the present — through creativity, collaboration, and sustained effort. 

As the Advancing Justice for Children process moves forward, these insights from this meeting will shape the comprehensive recommendations to be released in 2026. Those recommendations aim to turn discussion into action, international mechanisms, civil society, and even academic institutions. Each acknowledgment of harm, each child whose voice is heard, and each step toward repair brings the world a step closer to accountability that does not leave its youngest victims behind.