Gordon Brown is proposing something serious and simple: if adults are going to turn schools into battlefields, the world needs a law court built just to deal with the fallout on kids. He says no child should ever become collateral damage in a conflict, and he points to a recent Tomahawk missile strike on a school in Minab that killed 168 schoolgirls as the kind of outrage that proves his point.
Schools deserve the same status as hospitals
Brown, who serves as the UN special envoy for global education, argues that schools should be treated as protected places, the way hospitals are. His line is straightforward: classrooms should be safe havens, not places where pupils and teachers are easy targets who cannot fight back.
What the law says now, and why it fails
International law, including the founding statute of the International Criminal Court, already bans attacks on children and educational facilities. In practice, though, modern fighting often happens in cities and towns, and that makes schools vulnerable. Perpetrators often offer two tired excuses: the hits were accidental, or the school was somehow being used for military purposes. Those defenses still exist in law, which lets many attacks slide.
Brown’s point is legal and moral at once. Even if an attack is argued to be unintentional, he says that on any reasonable interpretation of humanitarian law, those who attack schools are failing to meet their duty to avoid known risks to children and to shelter them as innocent civilians.
The proposal: a court focused on crimes against children
To make these crimes unmistakably serious, Brown proposes creating a dedicated international criminal court for crimes against children. This court would not replace the ICC. Instead, it would have a narrower, sharper remit, concentrating on things like bombings of schools, mass abductions of pupils, and the enslavement of children by militias.
Alongside the new court, he suggests special protocols for prosecuting attacks on educational facilities and insists that UN member states fully implement the organisation’s monitoring and reporting mechanism for children in armed conflict. In short, better rules, better evidence, and boots on the ground to make sure the rules are followed.
Accountability at the top
Brown is clear about who should face justice: leaders who order, authorise, or knowingly permit attacks on children. He argues that such leaders should face the same kind of judicial accountability as other war criminals. His closing line is blunt and intended: there should be no hiding place for those who allow attacks on children.
This is not a paper exercise. It is a call to treat attacks on schools and children with the gravity they deserve, and to create legal mechanisms that actually deliver consequences when those protections are ignored.
