Accountability for child soldiering figures prominently in the just-published 2012 Yearbook on International Humanitarian Law. Part II of volume 15, titled “Child Soldiers and the Lubanga Case,” comprises 3 articles:

► Between Consolidation and Innovation: The International Criminal Court’s Trial Chamber Judgment in the Lubanga Case. This article focuses on aspects of the 2012 International Criminal Court judgment in Lubanga; specifically, the Trial Chamber’s: definition of the war crimes of conscription, enlistment, and use of child soldiers, as well as its determination that the underlying conflict was not of international character. The author is Dr. Sylvain Vité, now at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.

► The Effects of the Lubanga Case on Understanding and Preventing Child Soldiering. The author of this survey of the Lubanga judgment is Washington & Lee University Law Professor Mark A. Drumbl, whose most recent book, Reimagining Child Soldiers, I reviewed in the American Journal of International Law.

► Sexual Violence Against Children on the Battlefield as a Crime of Using Child Soldiers: Square Pegs in Round Holes and Missed Opportunities in Lubanga. This article takes the ICC Office of the Prosecutor to task for “[m]isconceptions … which saw the crime of use conflated with conscription/enlistment,” in a way that the author, Joe Tan, an attorney at the British NGO Human Dignity Trust, maintains undercut the prosecution of sexual violence.

(credit for photo of new IHL Yearbook, which also discusses cyberwarfare and the Tallinn Manual)