21st SESSION OF THE ASSEMBLY OF STATES PARTIES
6 December 2022
Name of the Event: Strengthening Coordination and Partnerships: The Next Step for Supporting Accountability for Crimes Against Children
Report by: Paul Weber, Senior Research Associate, PILPG
Highlights:
The event underlined that the ICC needs to give children, who are disproportionately affected by armed conflict, greater priority. Speakers also pointed out that in prosecuting crimes against children, the Court should ensure the involvement of children in a trauma-informed way. In all this, the collaboration between civil society, international bodies, and other actors involved was highlighted as an important way to turn the field of child rights into a more effective ecosystem.
Speakers:
Ms. Tessa Terpstra, Director of Advocacy, Save the Children Netherlands
H.E. Henk Cor van der Kwast, Ambassador of the Netherlands to the International Criminal Court
Ms. Veronique Aubert, Lead on Children and Armed Conflict, Save the Children United Kingdom and Special Adviser on Crimes Against and Affecting Children, International Criminal Court (Moderator)
Dr. Cécile Aptel, Professor of International Law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University
Ms. Virginia Gamba, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict
H.E. Karim Khan KC, Prosecutor to the International Criminal Court
Ms. Mikiko Otani, Chair of the Committee on the Rights of the Child
Ms. Prudence Acirokop, Child rights, and SGBV investigator and expert, Justice Rapid Response
Summary of the Event:
The side event “Strengthening Coordination and Partnerships: The Next Step for Supporting Accountability for Crimes Against Children”, organized by Save the Children in cooperation with Justice Rapid Response, commenced with opening remarks by Tessa Terpsta from Save the Children Netherlands, who set the scene by providing an overview of the situation of children and armed conflicts (CAAC) worldwide. In her view, the situation in Ukraine serves as a stark reminder of the grievous situation that too many children worldwide continue to find themselves in. 450 million children, one in every 6, lived in a conflict zone last year, with many being victims of killings, maiming, sexual violence, and other criminal conduct. In many justice processes, children remain largely invisible, without having their voices heard. She reported important advances, with the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan committing himself to giving greater regard to the issue of CAAC and also many States being more supportive of action in this area. Nevertheless, to her, accountability for crimes against children needs to be strengthened and involved actors have to coordinate and cooperate further.
Henk Cor van der Kwast, the Dutch ambassador to the ICC, highlighted his own country's efforts to give greater regard to the perspective of children in approaching the problems affecting them. As the violations that children disproportionately suffer in conflicts often have life-long consequences, he emphasized the need to give greater attention to CAAC and welcomed the ICC’s advances on the issue.
After the two welcome remarks, Prof. Cecile Aptel followed with a presentation of the findings of her book on CAAC. In her opinion, three characteristics of children make action on their behalf particularly important. Firstly, they make up an important part of the population: in some states, most notably many ICC situations, often half or even more than half of the population. As a consequence, attacks affecting civilians in such states often affect large numbers of children. Secondly, by virtue of their young age, children are especially vulnerable psychologically, physically, and emotionally, increasing the need to render justice to them. Lastly, children enjoy special protection under international law. Despite this, international criminal courts and tribunals from Tokyo and Nuremberg to the International Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda did not give due consideration to children as a special group. Only in the Special Court for Sierra Leone were child-specific crimes first prosecuted. Important advances, in her opinion, are the increasing inclusion of CAAC into the mandates of international courts and tribunals and the clear prosecutorial priority given to crimes against children. Beyond the courts, she also pointed to the important advances in including CAAC in mandates of international fact-finding missions, which serve an important role in bringing crimes to the attention of courts.
In finalizing the contextualization of the debate, the audience watched a video by the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General for CAAC, Virginia Gamba. Ms. Gamba presented her mandate, within which the UN Security Council had outlined six particularly egregious violations of children’s rights that have the potential to also threaten long-term peace. She advocated for a stronger child-centric lens in prosecution at the ICC and giving greater consideration to the testimonies of affected children. In her view, the fear that involving children in proceedings against their offenders bears too great a risk for retraumatization is misplaced. Ms. Gamba highlighted the importance that having their voices heard can have for children, also pointing to the availability of trauma-informed interview approaches that greatly mitigate potential risks.
The event then shifted to a panel discussion between Prosecutor Khan, Mikiko Otani, the chair of the Committee for the Rights of the Child (CRC), and Prudence Acirokop, a child rights and SGBV investigator and expert with Justice Rapid Response. Mr. Khan started his contribution by recognizing that despite the great advances in international criminal prosecution over the past 30 years, the global justice community had “failed responsibilities towards children”. As a complicating factor in meaningfully involving children in international criminal proceedings, he acknowledged the myriad of factors and individual needs and backgrounds of children that need to be taken into account. Nevertheless, the prosecutor vowed that “the main thing is, we need to do better”. For the purpose of strengthening coordination and partnership, the topic of this event, he proposed an annual roundtable between his office and the UNs Special Representatives, the UN Secretary-General, UNHCR, and UNWOMEN, aimed at coordinating how to better defend children’s rights in dialogue and mindful of each other’s mandates.
In terms of the specific activities of the ICC, the prosecutor problematized a number of points. Considering the success of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) in considering child rights violations, Mr. Khan recognized that the SCSL’s presence on the ground, close to the victims, had benefited it. Since taking office, he has increased the prosecution’s field presence in an attempt to move away from the practice of confining international justice to the “hermetically sealed, sterile environment” of the Court’s headquarters in The Hague. Secondly, Mr. Khan lamented that “for too long have we been conflating children with the general population”, thereby failing to give due attention to their particular rights and needs. Additionally, international justice has focused too much on the recruitment and use of children in armed conflicts as the primary crime against children, when this is only the “tip of the iceberg”. In an effort to improve child-sensitive justice, the prosecutor emphasized that a greater mind should be paid to the individual children. In response to Ms. Gamba’s statement, he pointed to the need to spread child-sensitive interviewing and investigation skills to be spread across all parts of his office, underlining how capable and reliable children are and how crucial it is to consider their testimonies.
The Chair of the CRC, Ms. Mikiko Otanki, who followed Mr. Khan, first outlined the relevance of her office’s mandate as a monitoring body in the area of children’s rights. She lamented that justice mechanisms are often not known to the victims and those working with them, making justice de facto unavailable to them. Beyond this, those working on children’s rights often are not well connected and lack knowledge of each other’s mandates, diminishing the effectiveness of the field as a professional ecosystem. In Ms. Otanki’s view, the integration of child-sensitive approaches presents a broad challenge that requires greater collaboration and knowledge-sharing. She outlined the need to make use of existing resources, like the 2005 ECOSOC Guidelines on Justice in Matters involving Child Victims and Witnesses of Crime, in the drafting and implementation of a child-sensitive justice policy. She ended with a call for close involvement of the CRC, as a body whose instrument enjoys almost universal ratification, in these endeavors.
Prudence Acirokop, a child rights expert working with Justice Rapid Response, then shared her practical insights from the field. She outlined the dual need for partnerships in the documentation of crimes against children. First, Ms. Acirokop discussed the role of partnerships with local actors on the ground in the collection of evidence and witness interviews, without which many of the affected communities would not be available. Second, and no less important, she emphasized that documentation cannot occur without the simultaneous provision of assistance to victims who suffered such egregious conduct. As such, professionals specialized in documentation and psychosocial or other assistance need to collaborate. Furthermore, Ms. Acirokop called on international and institutional actors to seek partnerships with documenters from the field. Practitioners can point out where there are gaps in the service provision of the international community and have regularly provided crucial advocacy and evidence that resulted in greater accountability. However, she also drew attention to the security needs of those active in the field, which can often best be met by collaboration with larger international actors. In her experience, sometimes documentation fails, as victims are scared of the repercussions of talking to civil society documenters. There is also the risk that those documenters themselves may be killed, detained, or disappear. In order to serve children better, the international community would also have to address the needs of those contributing from the field.
With Ms. Acirokop’s contribution to the panel discussion ended and moved over to the Q&A portion of the event. First, Mr. Maung Sawyedullah, himself a Rohingya forcibly displaced from Myanmar and currently residing in Bangladesh, virtually contributed a comment. He reported on his efforts in documenting crimes suffered by the Rohingya and called for greater support from international institutions in this endeavor, as a means to provide for greater victim involvement in international justice. Then Samuel Emonet, Executive Director of the event’s cosponsor Justice Rapid Response, outlined how his organization had increased the number of child rights experts like Ms. Acirokop on their roster of deployable experts. Furthermore, he pointed to his organization’s collaboration with Save the Children and the EU Commission in disseminating best-practice standards within the field. Philip Grant, the Executive Director of Trial International, recounted a case from the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which experts examined repeated rapes of children and in which child-sensitive interviews with the affected children provided the crucial evidence that led to the identification and conviction of the perpetrators. Lastly, Rikke Fredberg, from the European Commission’s European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations Directorate General (DG ECHO), outlined the EU’s commitments to CAAC in the form of a new child rights strategy and other policy documents as well as €109 million in humanitarian aid to CAAC.