Child soldiers and the defence of duress under International Criminal Law

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dc.contributor.authorNortje, Windell
dc.contributor.authorQuénivet, Noëlle
dc.contributor.authorMacmillan, Palgrave
dc.date.accessioned2021-05-28T08:02:53Z
dc.date.available2021-05-28T08:02:53Z
dc.date.issued2021
dc.description.abstractAtrocities 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.en_US
dc.identifier.citationNortje, W. et al. (2021). Child soldiers and the defence of duress under International Criminal Law. Nordic Journal of Human Rights, 38(4), 341-344en_US
dc.identifier.uri10.1080/18918131.2021.1889778
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10566/6214
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.publisherRoutledgeen_US
dc.subjectChild soldiersen_US
dc.subjectDefence of duressen_US
dc.subjectInternational criminal lawen_US
dc.subjectChild perpetratorsen_US
dc.subjectRwandaen_US
dc.titleChild soldiers and the defence of duress under International Criminal Lawen_US
dc.typeArticleen_US

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