International legal standards for the protection of children’s rights in the conditions of armed conflicts

In the article, the author outlined international legal standards for the protection of children’s rights in armed conflicts. The main problem for considering this topic is that in the modern world there are many armed conflicts, the nature and qualification of which is becoming more and more difficult to determine. Firstly, it is connected with the complication of the subject structure of the participants of the armed conflict, secondly, with the emergence of other such forms of influence on the conduct of the armed conflict, such as, for example, the implementation of “effective control” by states that are not parties of the conflict, as well as with the existing terminological ambiguity in the characteristics of the use of force between the conflicting parties, which can lead to an erroneous legal assessment of the situation. This applies equally to both international and non-international armed conflicts. The problem of the use of force in international law is closely related to the problem of protecting the civilian population.It was determined that the protection of children in armed conflicts is a complex of legal acts, the main of which are Additional Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions of 1977, the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, the Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labor in 1999, the Optional Protocol to The Convention on the Rights of the Child, which concerns the participation of children in armed conflicts of 2000, as well as established norms of customary humanitarian law. A number of international non-governmental movements are outlined, the activities of which are aimed at monitoring compliance by states with the norms of International Humanitarian Law regarding children, at stopping the parties to the conflict from committing crimes against children in the conditions of armed conflicts, at the rehabilitation of children who survived the armed conflict. The international courts’ observance of the principle of priority protection of children during armed conflicts and the situation with crimes against children that have come under the judicial control of the International Criminal Court have also been investigated.