Yes, I can. Thank you.
When I was asked by the Security Council to go to West Africa and prosecute those who bore the greatest responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity, in the statute they gave me I had the power, if I chose to do so, to prosecute someone whom I found between the ages of 16 and 18 for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Based on the mandate, and also based on my personal legal opinion after decades of practising law, particularly in this area, I realized that no child has what we call the mens rea, the evil-thinking mind, to commit a war crime. That is just an inappropriate approach to this. My mandate said “greatest responsibility”, and I found that no child bore the greatest responsibility for these war crimes and crimes against humanity.
But you have to put this in context. When you have children, be they 12, 13, 14, or 15, even if they voluntarily join the force, they're really not voluntarily joining the force. This was as much the case in Afghanistan, in many instances, as it was in Sierra Leone. The international community has clearly understood this: any child 15 years or younger just doesn't have the requisite mental capability to choose this particular situation, regardless of whether they volunteer or not.
Sierra Leone was horrific in many ways, but many of them did volunteer, and there were about 35,000 of them, as I said in my opening statement.
But that's not the point. The international standard is that we don't place children in situations of armed conflict such as this, where they could even have the capability to volunteer themselves to do that. Children, under the Geneva conventions, are to be especially protected, and I would say that certainly that is one of those standards. The floor here is that we don't put children, particularly under the age of 15, in those situations where they either volunteer or are coerced to do so.
We have a situation here, with Omar Khadr, who was 15, and you know the facts. In my opinion, he is a child soldier; he is a child placed in armed conflict who, under the circumstances, appears to maybe have volunteered—or may not have; that is in dispute. He was placed in a circumstance where he was forced to kill, and even that is in dispute at this point factually--whether he was the individual who in fact committed the alleged crime itself.
But that's not the point I'm making here, Madame. The point is, children shouldn't be placed in these situations, and if they are, we shouldn't prosecute them for what they did, because legally I don't think they're responsible at the international level during times of armed conflict.
As my colleague has very eloquently stated as well, we just don't do this any more. It has to stop, and that has to start here. We don't want to use Omar Khadr as a poster child to start down the very slippery slope whereby we do in fact prosecute children for war crimes. I chose not to, even up to the age of 18. I felt that they did not have the capacity to commit a war crime.