Child soldiers and the defence of duress under International Criminal Law
Loading...
Date
2021
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Routledge
Abstract
Atrocities committed by children are frequently explained away by arguments of coercion:
children are forced by commanders to participate in acts of extreme violence, threatened
with brutal punishment if they fail to comply. Indeed, in the limited cases where children
or former child soldiers have come before courts, duress has often been raised as a key
defence. In my own research on child perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda,1 ‘irresistible
constraint’, as it was worded in the Rwandan legislation, was frequently invoked by defendants; in the very first juvenile case before the Rwandan courts, the 16-year-old defendant
argued that he had been forced to kill his four nephews to save his own life. His plea was
accepted in part – as a mitigating factor rather than complete defence. Duress was one of
the defences raised by Dominic Ongwen before the International Criminal Court. Whilst
being prosecuted for crimes committed as an adult, Ongwen had been forcibly conscripted
into the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda around the age of 9 or 10.2 And duress has
played in important role in refugee exclusion proceedings, with child soldiers arguing that
they were coerced into committing crimes when seeking to negate individual criminal
responsibility as a ground for exclusion.
Description
Keywords
Child soldiers, Defence of duress, International criminal law, Child perpetrators, Rwanda
Citation
Nortje, W. et al. (2021). Child soldiers and the defence of duress under International Criminal Law. Nordic Journal of Human Rights, 38(4), 341-344