This book provides an original legal analysis of child soldiers recruited into armed groups or forces committing mass atrocities and/or genocide as the victims of the genocidal forcible transfer of children. Legal argument is made regarding the lack of criminal culpability of such child soldier 'recruits' for conflict-related international crimes and the inapplicability of currently recommended judicial and non-judicial accountability mechanisms in such cases. The book challenges various anthropological accounts of child soldiers' alleged 'tactical agency' to resist committing atrocity as members of armed groups or forces committing mass atrocity and/or genocide. Also provided are original interpretations of relevant international law including an interpretation of the Rome Statute age-based exclusion from prosecution of persons who were under 18 at the time of perpetrating the crime as substantive law setting an international standard for the humane treatment of child soldiers.

This book addresses the phenomenon of children as the particular targets of extreme cruelty and genocide during armed conflict. Selected International Criminal Court cases are analyzed to illustrate the ICC‘s failure to address the genocidal forcible transfer of children to armed State and/or non-State groups or forces perpetrating mass atrocities and/or genocide. An original legal interpretation of children as a protected group in the context of the genocide provision of the Rome Statute is provided. The work also examines certain examples of the various modes in which armed State and/or non-State groups or forces perpetrating mass atrocities and/or genocide appropriate children and accomplish the genocidal forcible transfer of children to the perpetrator group. It is argued that the failure to prosecute the genocidal forcible transfer of children through the ICC mechanisms (where the Court has jurisdiction and the State has failed to meet its obligations in this regard) undermines the perceived gravity of this heinous international crime within the international community. Furthermore, this ICC failure to prosecute conflicts with the interests of justice and ultimately results in an erosion of the respect for the personhood and human dignity of children.

Plight and Fate of Children During and Following Genocide examines why and how children were mistreated during genocides in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Among the cases examined are the Australian Aboriginals, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the Mayans in Guatemala, the 1994 Rwanda genocide, and the genocide in Darfur. Two additional chapters examine the issues of sexual and gender-based violence against children and the phenomenon of child soldiers. Following an introduction by Samuel Totten, the essays include: "Australia's Aboriginal Children"; "Hell is for Children"; "Children: The Most Vulnerable Victims of the Armenian Genocide"; "Children and the Holocaust"; "The Fate of Mentally and Physically Disabled Children in Nazi Germany"; "The Plight and Fate of Children vis-a-vis the Guatemalan Genocide"; "The Plight of Children During and Following the 1994 Rwandan Genocide"; "Darfur Genocide"; "Sexual and Gender-Based Violence against Children during Genocide"; and, "Child Soldiers." Contributors include: Colin Tatz, Henry C. Theriault, Asya Darbinyan, Rubina Peroomian, Jeffrey Blutinger, Amanda Grzyb, Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, Sara Demir, Hannibal Travis, and Samuel Totten. The editor and several of the contributors have personally investigated and witnessed the aftermath of genocidal campaigns.

This book examines selected legal complexities of the notion of torture and the issue of the proper foundation for legally characterizing certain acts as torture, especially when children are the targeted victims of torture. ICC case law is used to highlight the International Criminal Court’s reluctance in practice to prosecute as a separable offence the crime of torture as set out in one or more of the relevant provisions of the Rome Statute where children are the particularized targets as part of a common plan during armed conflict. Also addressed is the failure of the ICC to consider that the young age of the victims of torture (i.e. children) should be an aggravating factor taken into account in determining the ICC sentence for those convicted of the torture of civilians, including children, in the context of armed conflict as part of a common plan. The six UN-designated grave crimes against children (including child soldiering for State or non-State forces perpetrating mass atrocities, and sexual violence perpetrated on a systematic and widespread basis against children including child soldiers), it is argued, are also instances of the torture of children as part of a common plan such that separate charges of torture are legally supportable (along with the other charges relating to additional Rome Statute offences involved in such circumstances). Useful legal perspectives on the issue of the torture of children in its various manifestations gleaned from the case law of other international judicial forums such as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the ICTY are also examined.

This book presents a review of historical and emerging legal issues that concern the interpretation of the international crime of genocide. The Polish legal expert Raphael Lemkin formulated the concept of genocide during the Nazi occupation of Europe, and it was then incorporated into the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This volume looks at the issues that are raised both by the existing international law definition of genocide and by the possible developments that continue to emerge under international criminal law. The authors consider how the concept of genocide might be used in different contexts, and see whether the definition in the 1948 convention may need some revision, also in the light of the original ideas that were expressed by Lemkin. The book focuses on specific themes that allow the reader to understand some of the problems related to the legal definition of genocide, in the context of historical and recent developments. As a valuable contribution to the debate on the significance, meaning and application of the crime of genocide the book will be essential reading for students and academics working in the areas of Legal History, International Criminal Law, Human Rights, and Genocide Studies. Chapter 12 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003015222

This book offers various perspectives, with an international legal focus, on an important and underexplored topic, which has recently gained momentum: the issue of foreign fighters. It provides an overview of challenges, pays considerable attention to the status of foreign fighters, and addresses numerous approaches, both at the supranational and national level, on how to tackle this problem. Outstanding experts in the field – lawyers, historians and political scientists – contributed to the present volume, providing the reader with a multitude of views concerning this multifaceted phenomenon. Particular attention is paid to its implications in light of the armed conflicts currently taking place in Syria and Iraq. Andrea de Guttry is a Full Professor of International Law at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy. Francesca Capone is a Research Fellow in Public International Law at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna. Christophe Paulussen is a Senior Researcher at the T.M.C. Asser Instituut in The Hague, the Netherlands, and a Research Fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague.

This book examines and offers suggestions for how post-conflict practices should conceptualize and address harms committed by child soldiers for successful social reconstruction in the aftermath of mass atrocity. It defends the use of accountability and considers the agency of youth participants in violent conflict as responsible moral entities.

Cultural genocide is the systematic destruction of traditions, values, language, and other elements that make one group of people distinct from another.Cultural genocide remains a recurrent topic, appearing not only in the form of wide-ranging claims about the commission of cultural genocide in diverse contexts but also in the legal sphere, as exemplified by the discussions before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and also the drafting of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. These discussions have, however, displayed the lack of a uniform understanding of the concept of cultural genocide and thus of the role that international law is expected to fulfil in this regard. The Concept of Cultural Genocide: An International Law Perspective details how international law has approached the core idea underlying the concept of cultural genocide and how this framework can be strengthened and fostered. It traces developments from the early conceptualisation of cultural genocide to the contemporary question of its reparation. Through this journey, the book discusses the evolution of various branches of international law in relation to both cultural protection and cultural destruction in light of a number of legal cases in which either the concept of cultural genocide or the idea of cultural destruction has been discussed. Such cases include the destruction of cultural and religious heritage in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the forced removals of Aboriginal children in Australia and Canada, and the case law of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in relation to Indigenous and tribal groups' cultural destruction.

The practice of using children to participate in conflict has become a defining characteristic of 21st century warfare and is the most recent addition to the canon of international war crimes. This text examines the development of this crime of recruiting, conscripting or using children for participation in armed conflict, from human rights principle to fully fledged war crime, prosecuted at the International Criminal Court. The background and reasons for the growing use of children in armed conflict are analysed, before discussing the origins of the crime in international humanitarian law and human rights law treaties, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its Optional Protocol. Specific focus is paid to the jurisprudence of the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the International Criminal Court in developing and expanding the elements of the crime, the modes of ascribing liability to perpetrators and the defences of mistake and negligence. The question of how the courts addressed issues of cultural sensitivity, notably in terms of the liability of children, is also addressed.

From comparative perspective, this book explores the dynamics of child soldiering on the Myanmar-China border (i.e., Kachin and Shan States of Myanmar). At the same time, this book examines the structural factors and specific relationships between child soldiers, which have impacts on child soldiering. This book reveals that Myanmar has limited power to reduce child soldiering on the Myanmar-China border, and there is no optimal solution for reducing child soldiering in the near future. Instead, the book introduces the “transnational public-private partnership” approach as a “second best” solution and proposes suitable countermeasures for all the stakeholders.