Child Soldiers Across the World

While there was good news over the past year, there's a lot of progress yet to be made.

More than 11,000 child soldiers were freed from military slavery last year, but the United Nations believes hundreds of thousands around the world remain at the mercy of warlords like Thomas Lubanga.
The 14-year jail term ordered against Lubanga by the International Criminal Court on Tuesday is a "historic" signal, according to Radhika Coomaraswamy, who ends a six-year term this month as UN special representative on children in conflict.
The crime of recruiting and using children as soldiers "is now written in stone, nobody can say they are unaware of it," Coomaraswamy told AFP in an interview.
Governments are starting to get the message. Only Lubanga's native Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan are holding up a UN target to rid all government armies around the world of child soldiers by 2015.
The UN believes hundreds of thousands of children are forced to fight at gunpoint by the likes of the Taliban in Afghanistan, notorious Congo warlord Bosco Ntaganda, the Shebab in Somalia, Ansar Dine in Mali and other terror groups and private armies around the world.

By: Brant