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Jo Becker
Duke University’s Summer Institute on Human Rights was lucky enough to have Jo Becker speak today, about how she approaches advocacy and teaching. A long-time veteran of Human Rights Watch, she heads the Children’s Rights Division and is writing a book that collects stories of how advocates work for human rights around the world.
She divided advocacy into three areas. First, advocates must analyze an issue and determine if the source is culture, law of enforcement. That analysis includes, in Jo’s view, documenting the problem and doing education about the issue to the public.
Then, it’s important to develop a strategy — how are you going to get improvements? Finally, she talked about determining who can actually make change and how to reach them. Is it the government?Guerrillas? International bodies?
She used child soldiers as an example. In places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Colombia and Burma, children fight on all sides. These include boys and girls as well as children as young as seven. Among some groups, fighting is considered a child’s duty or a right of passage.
There is also a fundamental problem of law. The Convention on the Rights of the Child is the quickest treaty to be adopted internationally and is also the most widely ratified of the human rights covenants (the only two countries not to ratify are Somalia and the United States, which under President Ronald Reagan was concerned about supposed “anti-family” bias). Ratification means the treaty becomes a matter of national law and is enforceable.
The Convention defines a child as under 18, in all but one circumstance: fighting. The Convention holds that 15 is the minimum age for recruitment into the armed forces
In 1988, Jo was a part of the “Straight 18” campaign to create a new treaty on child soldiers that would raise the minimum age to 18. She told us how they built a strategy to influence policy makers by creating a coalition that included researchers, human rights advocates, child welfare workers, national groups, religious groups and people involved in rehabilitation. This allowed us to “speak in one voice and coordinate our strategies,” she said, and also established credibility.
One thing that was evident then was the lack of information on the subject — not many people knew about this issue. So the Coalition spent a lot of time documenting the issue and informing various publics. They also spent time building a network of people, including policy makers, concerned about the issue and willing to go public with declarations of support for a “straight 18” treaty.
In 2002, the campaign was able to get the United States to sign the Optional Protocol on children in armed conflict. Weirdly, the US was able to ratify this without signing the Convention. Jo pointed out that this is the only time that the US has changed its recruitment practices to adjust to a human rights treaty.
Several years later, Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Sam Brownback (R-KS) sponsored a bill that restricted US military aid to countries that have child soldiers in their armed forces. Enacted in 2008, the law currently affects six countries: Afghanistan, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Uganda.
The International Criminal Court now considers the use of child soldiers a prosecutable war crime.
So this is a huge — and rare — success story. This doesn’t mean that the use of child soldiers has stopped; but 133 countries have signed and the number of child soldiers has dropped by half, Jo estimated.
For students, I think this is a wonderful way to show that change can happen and progress can be made. Too often, there is a sense of helplessness against abuses and the inevitability of evil. But Jo’s retelling of this important story is a powerful antidote to inaction.
Jo’s book, which contains the full story of this and other campaigns, will be published as early as next year by Stanford University Press.
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- In Somalia, Children Carry Guns for U.S. Ally (nytimes.com)
- Girls Can Be Child Soldiers, Too (humantrafficking.change.org)
- U.N. Voices Concern on Child Soldiers and Says It’s Ready to Penalize Commanders (nytimes.com)
