Attachments
Introduction
This Wilton Park event on ‘Reintegration of Children Associated with Armed Forces or Armed Groups’ addresses a core recommendation from the April 2022 Wilton Park event ‘Preparing the children and armed conflict agenda for the future’. Besides being a critical issue on the global peace, security, and development agendas, recruitment and use of children by armed forces or armed groups continues to seriously impact children’s rights and protection in situations of armed conflict. Release and provision of adequate reintegration support for affected children is a critical response to this problem.
This event brought together representatives from governments, UN agencies, civil society organisations, legal, counter-terrorism, juvenile justice and child rights advisors as well as academics to discuss how actors can better cooperate to address existing gaps and needs to achieve successful reintegration of Children Associated with Armed Forces or Armed Groups (CAAFAG) while also taking a preventive approach.
Context and key policy issues
In April 2022 key stakeholders convened at Wilton Park to take stock of the progress made since the creation of the CAAC agenda 25 years ago. The event was an opportunity to discuss how the CAAC mandate has contributed to improving the protection of children in armed conflict, including for children associated with armed forces or groups. Participants celebrated good practices and identified barriers and challenges that remain to be addressed to increase protection for children and prevent the Six Grave Violations against children from taking place, and discussed how the mandate might be further strengthened for a second 25 years.
Against this backdrop, the reintegration of children who have exited armed forces or armed groups was identified as a key continuing challenge that needs to be addressed more holistically. As recruitment and use of children by armed actors continues to rise in many countries around the world, continued efforts aimed at preventing and ending this practice are still strongly needed.
Drawing on the key recommendations of the April 2022 event, this event, held 15-17 February 2023, aimed to build stronger programmatic linkages between humanitarian and longer-term development initiatives across the Humanitarian and Development Nexus. It also discussed how to secure access to longer term innovative financing by placing a focus on responses to children’s needs using a prevention lens.