Good afternoon, and thank you so much for allowing me to be here, particularly with someone whom I admire so greatly and a colleague whom I knew in East Africa while I was doing work in West Africa. So we come to you with some unique perspectives, from a continent that saw both conflict and children being abused. I hope we can have a good dialogue today related to this, because what I saw in West Africa was beyond description, as I described to the tribunal in my opening statement against the leadership of the civil defence force.
Imagine a child who has no hope, and this is what I want to start off with. I also want to thank you again, Mr. Chairman and the members of this committee, for allowing me to address you today. I approached you not as a professor at Syracuse University College of Law but as someone who has seen child soldiers, who has seen what they have done. I have looked them in the eye, I have talked to them, I have hugged them, I've cried with them, and I've come to you to tell you that when I was the chief prosecutor at the International War Crimes Tribunal in Sierra Leone, I chose not to prosecute child soldiers, as it is my opinion that no child under the age of 15 can commit a war crime. That's why we're here, to be thinking and considering this particular proposition.
I am not a member of Omar Khadr's defence team, nor do I condone or comment on the situation related to Omar Khadr, though I'd be willing to chat with you about that. I simply come to you today, humbly, to discuss the scourge of child soldiers and what the international community has failed to do, and that is to cause an international consensus related to this. My work in Sierra Leone allowed us to investigate, indict, prosecute, and convict senior members of the civil defence force, the Revolutionary United Front, as well as the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, of a new crime against humanity, and that is the unlawful recruitment of children under the age of 15. So with that being said, I think it's important for us to just consider a few things.
I also want to recognize the leadership of Canada and the people of Canada related to this issue of international humanitarian law, particularly child soldiers. Canada was always a great supporter of my work while I was there for three years, from 2002 to 2005. They provided money, but more importantly they provided me young Canadians who had a heart of gold, going out in some places to seek justice for those who were abused in West Africa. I recall many times my good friends from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, hard-core homicide investigators out with me investigating killing fields, all of us having tears streaming down our faces, having never seen anything quite like this, many of them the product of child soldiers.
I'd like to give you a vignette, because I think it's very important for you to understand. I think this personalizes the concept of child soldiers.
While chief prosecutor in West Africa, in Sierra Leone, I literally walked the entire countryside, listening to the people of Sierra Leone in my town hall meetings tell me what took place in that particular region. I was in Makeni, the former headquarters of the infamous Revolutionary United Front, and I was speaking to a group of about 400 people, which is not untypical of the size of the meetings. My approach was to stand in front of the people and literally talk to them, listen to them, cry with them, laugh with them, hug them. I was answering questions about the special court and other issues, and a little hand came up from the back. I walked to the back of the room and this young man about 12 years old stood up. He had been injured and had become deaf from the conflict. He signed, but he also spoke, and in the atonal voice of someone who is deaf, looked me right in the eye and said he had killed people, he was sorry, he didn't mean it. He was 12, the conflict had been over about two years, so you can do the math. He probably was eight or nine years old when he was killing human beings.
I went over to him, tears coming down my cheeks, and hugged him. He wept in my arms. That's a child soldier. There were 35,000 of them in Sierra Leone alone.
So one has to consider, despite what he may have done, who is really at fault here. I would say that a child soldier and the victims of child soldiers all are victims, because they are usually placed in these situations in armed conflict, be it in Afghanistan, East Africa, Uganda, or West Africa, in situations they cannot control.
The international law in this area is pretty clear, even though it doesn't say that children are immune from their war-like acts. It just says that children are to be especially protected--the Geneva conventions. That suggests we shouldn't put them in places that cause them to do these things, even if they do them voluntarily, because a child does not have the capability of making those choices.
This is my opening statement to you. I'd like to simply finish with another comment I made in my opening statement before the tribunal in West Africa, if you will bear with me, please.
He was a young man. He had been captured by the Revolutionary United Front. A group of individuals, all children, were lined up by the members of the Revolutionary United Front and made to answer a question. Do you want to join us or do you want to go home? All of them were under the age 15. They all chose to go home. Of course, that was the wrong answer. They began killing from right to left, and by the time they got to the middle child they began to volunteer to be child soldiers.
The individual I'm talking about was the last and he was on the left. It was just one of the those situations where they chose to go one way or the other. They were all held down and had RUF carved in their chests with a cutlass. From then on--some were 12, some were 13, and I think one was nine--they killed their way across Sierra Leone.
It's incumbent upon the international community to ensure that we don't place children in these situations; that we respect the results of that situation and take great care to ensure we don't automatically treat children who are in these extreme situations as adults or war criminals.
With that, Mr. Chairman, I thank you for this time.