...Kadar doesn't fit this description by any stretch of the imagination.
Today’s letters: Just who is a child soldier?
July 17, 2010 – 8:00 am
REUTERS/Jacky Naegelen
Child soldiers in an ethnic Hema militia camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Is Omar Khadr a “child soldier”? Columnist Chris Selley thinks so, while Ezra Levant thinks not. Prime Minister Harper is skeptical.
International law instruments define an underage fighter as any soldier under 18. Mr. Khadr was a child when he fought in Afghanistan, and he is a form of soldier. But let’s not be blindly formalist about our choice of words.
The special terminology of “child soldier” was coined in African conflicts where children are abducted from their homes in order to serve some warring group, and then often made to perpetrate violence against their village and family. That is not Omar Khadr, whose own father brought him into the battlefield. His situation is more reminiscent of a teenager raised by an underworld crime family who is charged with being a hit man. That would be a young offender who gets special procedures from the justice system, but who would not be exonerated as would a child abducted in Sierra Leone, Liberia, or northern Uganda.
Canadian legal values say that everyone, including those held at Guantanamo, deserves due process, and that anyone under 18 should get special treatment as a young offender. But to confuse Omar Khadr with the horrific story of African child soldiers by using the same terminology is unfair to those children from African conflicts and their families.
Professor Ed Morgan, University of Toronto, Faculty of Law.
I’m flattered that for two days in a row, Chris Selley felt moved to respond to my column about Omar Khadr that was published in Sun newspapers.
I’d like to reply to only one point: Mr. Selley’s Friday column was subtitled “No matter what Ezra Levant says, the term ‘child soldier’ applies to anyone under 18.”
Read More
No comments:
Post a Comment