The price of peace: Why Nepal’s transitional justice cannot erase its child soldiers

As the old cliche goes, ‘easier said than done’, when Nepal’s Parliament updated the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Act in 2024, political leaders proclaimed a historic milestone. The state promised to close a painful historical chapter nearly two decades after the comprehensive peace Agreement ended the decade long conflict. Yet behind the celebratory rhetoric lies a calculated omission, thousands of children who were handed weapons instead of notebooks were scrubbed from the legal definition of “serious human rights violations.”

The country’s political establishment engineered a convenient collective amnesia. But in June 2026, the Supreme Court delivered a stark reminder that peace built on forgotten victims is no peace.

Responding to a petition brought by former child combatant Lenin Bista, a full bench comprising Justices Sapana Pradhan Malla, Sunil Kumar Pokharel, and Shanti Singh Thapa, the Supreme Court issued a historic verdict. The Court ordered the government to pass a new law specifically criminalising the recruitment and use of minors in armed conflict and alongside classifying these acts as severe human rights violations. Crucially, the bench commanded state agencies to immediately halt the usage of derogatory labels like “disqualified” or “discharged”, terms that have stripped these individuals of their constitutional right of dignified life for almost twenty years.

The verdict exposed an uncomfortable truth that Nepal’s transitional justice framework was negotiated to protect the powerful, not to deliver justice to the vulnerable.

A clash with international law and scholarship

The exclusion of child combatants from Nepal’s amended transitional justice framework was no innocent legislative oversight. Rather it was a calculated political trade-off. Defining the recruitment of minors as a serious human rights violation would have exposed top party leaders and military commanders to command-level liability under international law. To shield political elites from prosecution, lawmakers simply rewrote the definitions.

Read also: Transitional justice process throughout history, Where does Nepal stand?

In doing so, Parliament chose short-term political expediency over long-standing international obligations. The International Committee of the Red Cross is unequivocal in a way the prohibition against enlisting children under 18 is a rule of customary international law that binds both state militaries and non-state armed groups. Moreover, under the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child ( OPAC), ratified in 2007 and ILO Convention 182 (ratified in 2002), Nepal is legally bound to criminalise underage recruitment and guarantee comprehensive recovery programs.

Jurisprudential precedent leaves no room for statutory ambiguity. In Prosecutor v. Sam Hinga Norman, the Special Court for Sierra Leone established that the prohibition against recruiting children had crystallised into customary international law, establishing individual criminal responsibility regardless of domestic legislative gaps.

Building on this, the landmark 2012 International Criminal Court ruling in Prosecutor v. Thomas Lubanga Dyilo established that “enlisting and conscripting” minors constitutes a severe war crime, explicitly ruling that a child’s “consent” to join an armed group is legally void. Together, these rulings affirm that weaponising children is not a political maneuver to be excused by peace accords, but an international crime that triggers strict state accountability.

Moreover, the recruitment and exploitation of minor combatants constitutes a fundamental breach of human rights that cannot be erased by domestic political backroom deals or sweeping amnesties. As legal scholar Anja Seibert-Fohr notes in the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, an amnesty operates essentially as an “act of erasure,” creating a legal base for governments not to punish offenders, granting immunity from the law, and blocking criminal or civil proceedings. When political leaders attempt to sanitise the recruitment of children under the guise of post-conflict reconciliation, they are using legislative erasure to shield systemic illegality. True transitional justice cannot co-exist with deliberate legal amnesia.

The binary of “Victim vs. Perpetrator” and beyond

Recent academic literature from Oxford’s International Affairs (Macfarlane, 2023) highlights how traditional Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) models fail because they force former child combatants into a rigid binary: either passive victims or political agents. In Nepal, when UNMIN verified nearly 4,000 minor combatants, the state summarily ousted them from cantonments with a pittance, a mere NRs 10,000 (roughly $75), and called them ‘disqualified instead of being called ‘child victims of war’ (which would entitle them to protection and trauma care), they were given a stigmatising label.

Similarly, a research published in Oxford’s International Journal of Transitional Justice titled Connecting Truth Commissions, Socioeconomic Harms and Child Participation by Sean Molly analyses how transitional justice mechanisms often overlook structural and socioeconomic harms inflicted on children/minors such as lost educational access, social disruption, and long-term economic exclusion, and demonstrates why addressing these harms is essential for meaningful post-conflict reintegration and child participation.

Furthermore, landmark studies produced by the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program and UNICEF (Children and Transitional Justice) argue that true reconciliation requires truth commissions to actively investigate how children were targeted and used. By intentionally excluding child recruitment from the TRC’s investigative mandate, Nepal’s lawmakers signaled that the rights of children can be discarded whenever they become politically inconvenient.

The path ahead

True reconciliation requires an honest accounting of the past, not political deals to safeguard oneself. When a state legally overlooks an entire class of victims, it ignores the moral foundation of its own democratic transition.

The Supreme Court’s 2026 directive offers the government a vital and final opportunity to correct its course. Enacting a statute that criminalises child soldier recruitment, reforming the TRC’s scope to guarantee reparations, and replacing stigmatising state labels with meaningful educational and psychosocial support are not optional acts of political charity. Rather they are binding legal duties.

Nepal cannot claim to have healed from the wounds of war while the children it failed remain legally invisible. Until the state acknowledges the full extent of the harm done to its youngest combatants, its path to true reconciliation will remain fundamentally broken.