(Beirut) – The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of Iran is currently conducting a campaign to recruit children as young as 12 years old to voluntarily join as “fighters for the defense of the homeland,” Human Rights Watch said today. The recruitment and use of children for military purposes is a serious violation of children’s rights, and a war crime when the children are under 15 years old.
On March 26, an official from the IRGC’s 27th Mohammad Rasulullah division in Tehran stated that a campaign to enlist civilians, titled “Fighters for the Defense of the Homeland in Iran,” had set the minimum recruitment age at 12 years. In the context of thousands of attacks by the United States and Israel throughout the country, these children would be at serious risk of death or injury if they were on military installations. Iranian authorities should halt this campaign and ban all military and paramilitary forces in Iran from recruiting children under 18.
“There is no justification for an army recruitment campaign to encourage children to enlist, especially children as young as 12,” said Bill Van Esveld, Deputy Director of the Children’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. “It boils down to a simple fact: Iranian authorities appear willing to put children’s lives at risk for additional manpower.”
This campaign aims to recruit civilians to provide catering and medical services, distribute items, handle damaged homes, and engage in security activities such as manning checkpoints, or participating in operational and surveillance patrols, and vehicle convoys, said Rahim Nadali, an IRGC official, during an interview with the Iranian news agency Defa Press. An promotional poster for the recruitment campaign, published by the news agency, also lists these activities and features two children, a boy and a girl, alongside two adults, one of whom in military uniform.
In the past month, the United States and Israel have carried out tens of thousands of airstrikes against numerous Basij and IRGC installations, and several Basij checkpoints in Tehran, resulting in deaths and injuries among these forces.
Several children have already been victims of illegal attacks in Iran. Human Rights Watch estimated that an illegal attack on an Iranian primary school in Minab on February 28, which killed dozens of schoolchildren and other civilians, should be investigated as a war crime. According to a preliminary report by the US military, the United States may be responsible for this attack. Human Rights Watch has called on Congress to hold special hearings on the US military’s targeting practices.
Iran has been recruiting children under 18 into the Basij forces for several years. During the civil war in Syria, the IRGC recruited Afghan immigrant children living in Iran as child soldiers, whom they sent to Syria to support Bashar al-Assad’s government; Human Rights Watch documented boys as young as 14 being killed in combat. Iranian officials have stated that in the 1980s, authorities recruited hundreds of thousands of children to fight during the Iran-Iraq war, and tens of thousands of them were killed.
The United Nations Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict states that “regardless of their role, [children] associated with parties to the conflict are exposed to extreme levels of violence.”
Iranian law explicitly allows recruitment into the military for children as young as 15 years old.
Under the Statutes and Regulations of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, anyone must be at least 16 years old to be recruited by the IRGC, whether as a permanent staff member, contractor, or special Basij member. Special Basij members are honorary guards of the IRGC who “possess the qualifications of a [official] guard and […] commit to be available to the IRGC full-time when needed.” However, according to Article 94, children aged 15 and over can be considered “active” members, capable of “collaborating with the IRGC in carrying out the missions entrusted to them” after receiving training.
In 1998, in its first report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, Iran stated that national legislation set 16 as the minimum age “for engagement in the armed forces for military preparation” and 17 as the minimum age for the police force.
The United Nations Security Council “strongly condemned” the recruitment of children and established a reporting system, led by the Secretary-General, which considers this practice a “serious violation” of children’s rights. The Convention on the Rights of the Child prohibits the recruitment of children under 15. An Optional Protocol to the Convention, signed by Iran but not ratified, stipulates that the minimum age for direct participation in hostilities is 18. Iran is obligated to adhere to customary international law, which states that recruiting children under 15 is a war crime.
“Those involved in this reprehensible policy are exposing children to serious and irreversible harm, and are themselves subject to criminal prosecution,” concluded Bill Van Esveld. “Senior leaders who fail to end this situation cannot claim to care about the fate of Iranian children.”
West-France
