International decisions on sanctions and regime punishment must be carefully designed to generally avoid punishing children. It is time to start campaigning that    so-called targetted sanctions be restricted to specific individuals and not state institutions that in turn may begin to reduce support to children's programmes like health and education in order to survive. Despotic regimes by nature could'nt care less about sharing meagre resources with hungry children. When sanctions reduce a country's resource base then the children will suffer in the competition for resources between them and adults. Sanctions should be independently monitored by a body outside of the United Nations to determine the effects on children in the country undergoing these sanctions. This body could be made up of Civil Society Institutions and representatives from the world bodies.

Children are human beings and so child rights are human rights. When the so called International Community imposes sanctions on nations due to one reason or another these must not harm children in any way. Governments and individual Presidents that perpetrate such economic sanctions should be cited for Crimes against Children's Humanity. That rationale for sanctions is usually unclear and counter to the normal objective thinking. The stated aim is usually that the leaders of a country under sanctions will feel so isolated that they will go back to the world society  as pernitents, sorry for flouting international law and willing to obey. This is hardly ever the case, normally such sanctions which are ostensibly designed to protect human rights end up in out-right war. In these wars children are even less protected and the weapons of both the international community and the rogue regime are turned on the poor children. War is merciless and is highly terrorising to children. 

Regimes are not always going to be brought down by war, but children will always die in large numbers. In a war the rule of law breaks down and men with heavy weapons roam the streets and jungles ready only to kill. Children cannot defend themselves against such men and are even forcibly recruited to kill or otherwise gratify the evil desires of these men. The media forgets the children and concentrates on general statistics often using the refrain"...men, women and children..." to identify mass deaths or "...innocent women and children..." to highlight a particularly worrisome casualty rate. In both cases children are lumped with adults thereby submerging their suffering to those of their loving parents. 

Child rights assume individuality, individual pain matters as much as mass pain. When nations go to war let them be held to account for the deaths of children as separate from those of adults. The reason for this is that children are the future of mankind and therefore deserve special protection. Killing children is a form of postponed ethnic cleansing. There is no guarantee, and indeed there should be none, that assumes that a nation's reproductive balance will not be damaged by war deaths of children. Who will know whether the balance between boys and girls will be retained to continue the pre-war population replenishment patterns?  What about the damage to limbs and psychology? Those who bring war upon a nation's children must be made to pay for the damage to the children. The term "Collateral Damage" must be out-lawed when referring to human deaths. It goes against the spirit  of Human Rights law and is a de-sensitizing  military term. 

Sanctions are normally the precurssor to civil or cross-border war of one form or another. Of particular concern is the fact that children would have been tortured by years of sanctions before any war is declared. Children grow into adult-hood under these sanctions and bear their own children. The world is cold to this suffering focusing rather on the leader they are uniting to depose. This calls into debate the whole idea of the UN CRC. Why should those who mandated themselves to protect children under such a strict Covenant so easily ignore it when it comes to international conflicts? Why should it not even be a matter worth stopping to consider? No war is good and should only be used to force back and neutralise specific military aggression. For the fact that no war today ends with out-right victory but always in discussion, it follows that the child deaths are simply not un-avoidable. The world sacrifices children in war and sanctions simply because it can. Multi-national wars are particularly dangerous to children because when the whole world fights against a country it can never hold itself to account for atrocities commited by its forces against children.

Heavy weapons are designed to be used against massed enemy forces. Yet, since the second world war both the axis and allied forces bombed civillian installations and populations to bring about shock and terror to these populations and by arttrition reduce the number of enemy combatants decisively. In the process children died in large numbers, including those still in their mother's wombs. Yet this is never discussed and the world continues to use these mass-destrucion  weapons. The point is you cannot protect children while you are firing at them or their mothers and fathers. The hypocrisy of world courts and targetted sanctions is that they only deal with the crimes of the weak and the loser. Nations can simply kill children and walk away when they are powerful. In any bad regime only the top-most leaders ever get punished, the actual soldiers who personally decide to rape and kill children get away with it. No army has yet to be punished as a whole, Generals are punished even if they themselves never participated in the rape and killing of children. But international law is not only for Presidents of weak nations and their Generals. It is for all individual human beings. Soldiers decide to rape on their own, they decide to kill children on their own. They can mutiny against orders because no national army has a code of rape, torture and killing of civillians-especially when these are children. 

It is time to hold everybody to account for bringing terror upon children and for killing them with impunity and plan.

Alexander Chola Fundafunda
CRM