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Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee

Party

D

State

TX

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the Senate bill (S. 2135) to prohibit the recruitment or use of child soldiers, to designate persons who recruit or use child soldiers as inadmissible aliens, to allow the deportation of persons who recruit or use child soldiers, and for other purposes, as amended.

The Clerk read the title of the Senate bill.

Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee

Party

D

State

TX

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous materials on the bill under consideration.

Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee

Party

D

State

TX

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, let me note what a tragedy it is that we have to stand on the floor of the House in 2008 to speak about the exploitation of children as soldiers. Up to 250,000 children are exploited each day around the world in state-run armies, paramilitaries and guerilla groups. These child soldiers, boys and girls as young as 8 years old, are forced to serve as combatants and human mine detectors. They are often used to conduct suicide missions, and many are used as sex slaves. In fact, we have seen many of them turn themselves in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Colombia. In many cases they are provided with drugs and alcohol to numb them to the atrocities they are required to commit. In all cases, their childhoods are taken from them, their health and lives are endangered, and their psyches are destroyed.

It is a war crime under customary international law to recruit or use children under 15 years of age as soldiers.

I am reminded of an early amendment when I first came to the United States Congress that I added to an appropriations bill that we should restrain the use of appropriations foreign aid for those countries that would not commit to releasing their child soldiers. It is an ongoing and persistent problem.

It is a violation of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which 110 countries, including the U.S., have ratified, to recruit or use child soldiers under the age of 18. But such actions do not currently violate U.S. criminal or immigration law. We are thus hindered in our ability to prevent those who use or recruit child soldiers from coming to our country, and we are unable to punish those perpetrators who make it here. In contrast, other grave human rights violations, including torture, are punishable under U.S. criminal and immigration law.

The Child Soldier Accountability Act of 2008 would correct this disparity by making it a Federal crime and violation of immigration laws to recruit or use child soldiers under the age of 15.

This bipartisan legislation was sponsored in the Senate by Senators Dick Durbin and Tom Coburn, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law. They worked together on this bill to ensure that war criminals who would exploit children cannot find safe haven in our country.

The bill we vote on today is slightly changed from the bill that was sent to us by the Senate. It now includes changes agreed to in bipartisan and bicameral discussions between Senators Durbin, Coburn, Jon Kyl and Jeff Sessions, as well as numerous House Members, including Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and Ranking Member Lamar Smith, Crime Subcommittee Chairman Bobby Scott and Ranking Member Louie Gohmert, and Immigration Subcommittee Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren and Ranking Member Steve King.

The United States must hold accountable the war criminals who steal the childhood of innocents by turning them into killers or human fodder. I thus urge my colleagues to support this important legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Rep. Steve King

Party

R

State

IA

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of S. 2135, the Child Soldier Accountability Act of 2008, which prohibits the use of children under the age of 15 in military forces or armed conflicts.

Children are currently used as soldiers in over 20 countries. An estimated 200,000 to 300,000 children are used as soldiers for rebel groups, militias and government armed forces. The individuals who recruit children do so because children are physically vulnerable and easily intimidated. Many children are recruited by force and often compelled to follow orders under threat of death. Child soldiers are a global phenomenon. The problem is most critical in Africa and Asia, but armed groups in the Americas, Eurasia and the Middle East also use child soldiers.

The United States is a party to the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict. President Clinton signed the Optional Protocol in 2000 and it was ratified by the Senate in 2002.

The Optional Protocol requires states to raise the age of voluntary recruitment from 15 and to impose a binding declaration of the minimum age for recruitment into their armed forces. The protocol also requires states to take all feasible measures to ensure that members of the armed forces under the age of 18 do not participate in hostilities and prohibits the conscription of anyone under the age of 18 into the armed forces.

The protocol prohibits the recruitment or use in hostilities of children under the age of 18 by rebel or other nongovernmental and armed groups and requires states to criminalize such practices.

In addition to joining the Optional Protocol, the United States funds programs to, one, rehabilitate children who were abducted in Southern Sudan and Northern Uganda; two, demobilize 4,000 children soldiers in Afghanistan and enroll them in education and counseling programs; and three, reintegrate former child combatants in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Liberia.

The bill before us today complements the ongoing efforts of the United States to combat the use of child soldiers. S. 2135 is the product of several months of good-faith negotiations among Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate and the administration.

The amended version of S. 2135 that the House will vote on today includes several technical changes to clarify the intent and scope of the bill. Most notably, the bill ensures that U.S. military recruiting practices are not impeded by this legislation. The bill also authorizes the government to deport or deny admission to any individual who recruits or uses child soldiers under the age of 15. I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee

Party

D

State

TX

Mr. Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to yield such time as he may consume to the chairman of the Subcommittee on Crime of the House Judiciary Committee, Bobby Scott of Virginia.

Rep. Robert C. Scott

Party

D

State

VA

I thank the gentlelady for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of S. 2135, the Child Soldiers Accountability Act of 2008. S. 2135 amends title 18 of the United States Code to create a criminal provision under U.S. law aimed at those who recruit or conscript children under the age of 15 into armed conflict. It establishes criminal penalties for up to 20 years in prison and up to life imprisonment if death results from the crime.

The bill also makes it a violation of immigration law for any person seeking admission to the United States to have committed such acts.

Finally, the bill would extend United States jurisdiction to perpetrators of this crime who are present in the United States, regardless of their nationality or where the crime takes place, so that those who commit these crimes cannot use this country as a safe haven from prosecution. This type of jurisdiction exists for similar crimes such as laws on torture and genocide, which allow for extraterritorial jurisdiction for crimes committed outside of the United States.

In at least 18 countries around the world, children are utilized as direct participants in war. Many of these children soldiers, some as young as 8 years old, are abducted or recruited by force and often compelled to follow orders to participate under harsh duress. And girls make up more than 30 percent of child soldiers and participate in many conflicts. Oftentimes, they are abused and raped. Once recruited, these children, boys and girls, participate in all forms of combat, even wielding AK-47s and M-16s as portrayed in the media.

There is international opposition to recruiting and using child soldiers. Over 110 countries, including the United States, have ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits the recruitment and use of child soldiers under the age of 18. Nevertheless, the prevalence and nature of the child soldier problem is not going away. It continues to plague the international community. For example, in Uganda, the rebel group has abducted at least 20,000 children and has forced them to work as laborers, soldiers, and sex slaves. We hear about the ongoing persecution and atrocities in Burma, but what has escaped media attention is the use of child soldiers there, as the government has recruited up to 70,000 children, more than any other country in the world.

Recruiting and using child soldiers does not currently violate United States criminal law. S. 2135 was introduced by Senator Durbin and Senator Coburn to correct that problem. We overwhelmingly passed the Genocide Accountability Act last year to end the immunity gap in genocide law. By this bill, we seek to do the same thing for those who maliciously recruit and use innocent children in warfare. I urge my colleagues to support the bill.

Rep. Steve King

Party

R

State

IA

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, as I listen to the debate here and contemplate the global situation of 200,000, 300,000 child soldiers and what that means, and the repatriation, so to speak, of the child soldiers in Afghanistan, having just returned from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Georgia, and having walked in some of the dust-covered mountains and in the dust-covered plains over there and been brought up to speed in briefings in both of those countries, it occurs to me how tough it is over in that part of the world, how close they are to the Stone Age, and how difficult it is to live in that country, let alone stand and fight, and the generations of warfare that have built one on top of the other. There is not a generation there that can remember not having fought.

Life expectancy in Afghanistan, 44 years. Up until a couple years ago, Afghanistan, by my recollection, was the only country in the world where men could expect to live longer than women, even though men were the ones that were most often killed in the conflict. The health care is that bad.

When young people are brought up in warfare and they are conscripted into the military and they are confronted with armed conflict at an early age, they may not know any other way of life. And to bring them back into education and try to repatriate them into more of, as we would see it, a normal lifestyle is a very difficult task. But Mr. Speaker, we must. We must break that cycle of violence. We must break that cycle of violence and the culture that reconstitutes at each generation. That is the case in Afghanistan, it is the case in Iraq, it is the case in the West Bank and in the Gaza strip and Israel proper. And it goes on and on and on around this world.

When little children, when little girls are raised to wear a pseudo suicide belt as part of perpetuating a culture of violence, when they are taught to hate people because of their religion or their ethnicity and they see that practiced on the news every day, when I turn on al-Jazeera TV and I see the venom and the hatred that is there, when I watch the leaders of the people that oppose us bring it back home to be inspiring in recruiting people who believe that their path to salvation is killing people who are not like them, then I understand how important it is to break this cycle. I don't know if we are going to be able to do that. I think this bill will move us a little bit closer along that way. At least it stands on the right principle for the right cause, and I urge its adoption.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee

Party

D

State

TX

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

By listening to my two colleagues from Iowa and from Virginia, you can see the commonality of viewpoints on this persistent and cancerous aspect of our world society, the continuous use of child soldiers.

I offer to my colleagues the words of a child soldier, and I read them as follows:

``My parents refused to give me to the LITE, so about 15 of them came to my house. It was both men and women in uniforms with rifles and guns in holsters. I was fast asleep when they came to get me at one point in the morning. These people dragged me out of the house. My father shouted at them, saying, `What is going on?' Some of the LITE soldiers took my father away towards the woods and beat him. They also pushed my mother onto the ground when she tried to stop them.''

This girl was recruited by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka at age 16.

Another story from a young child:

``Early on, when my brothers and I were captured, the LRA explained to us that all five brothers couldn't serve in the LRA because we would not perform well. So they tied up my two younger brothers and invited us to watch. Then they beat them with sticks until two of them died. They told us it would give us strength to fight. My youngest brother was 9 years old.''

Martin, recruited by the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda at age 12.

This legislation of course is long overdue. And I would ask my colleagues to consider that it may be time after time and year after year that we have to continue to pass this legislation, but I would hope that we would be persistent, hope that the President signs this legislation, and, as well, that we can stamp out the cancer of using and victimizing these wonderful children.

I would like to submit these statements into the Record from Human Rights Watch: Child Soldiers, The Voices of Child Soldiers.

``The section leader ordered us to take cover and open fire. There were seven of us, and seven or ten of the enemy. I was too afraid to look, so I put my face in the ground and shot my gun up at the sky. I was afraid their bullets would hit my head. I fired two magazines, about forty rounds. I was afraid that if I didn't fire the section leader would punish me.''--Khin Maung Than, recruited by Burma's national army at age eleven. ``My parents refused to give me to the LTTE so about fifteen of them came to my house--it was both men and women, in uniforms, with rifles, and guns in holsters. . . . I was fast asleep when they came to get me at one in the morning. . . . These people dragged me out of the house. My father shouted at them, saying, ``What is going on?'' but some of the LTTE soldiers took my father away towards the woods and beat him. . . . They also pushed by mother onto the ground when she tried to stop them.''--girl recruited by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka at age sixteen. ``I was captured in Lofa County by government forces. The forces beat me, they held me and kept me in the bush. I was tied with my arms kept still and was raped there. I was fourteen years old. . . . After the rape, I was taken to a military base. . . . I was used in the fighting to carry medicine. During the fighting I would carry medicine on my head and was not allowed to talk. I had to stand very still. I had to do a lot of work for the soldiers, sweeping, washing, cleaning. During this time, I felt really bad. I was afraid, I wanted to go home, but was made to stay with the soldiers.''--Evelyn, recruited in Liberia by government forces at age fourteen. ``I had a friend, Juanita, who got into trouble for sleeping around. We had been friends in civilian life and we shared a tent together. The commander said that it didn't matter that she was my friend. She had committed an error and had to be killed. I closed my eyes and fired the gun, but I didn't hit her. So I shot again. The grave was right nearby. I had to bury her and put dirt on top of her. The commander said, ``You did very well. Even though you started to cry, you did well. You'll have to do this again many more times, and you'll have to learn not to cry.''--Angela, joined the FARC-EP in Colombia at age twelve. ``Early on when my brothers and I were captured, the LRA explained to us that all five brothers couldn't serve in the LRA because we would not perform well. So they tied up my two younger brothers and invited us to watch. Then they beat them with sticks until two of them died. They told us it would give us strength to fight. My youngest brother was nine years old.''--Martin, recruited by the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda at age twelve.

Rep. Michael M. Honda

Party

D

State

CA

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak in very strong support of the Child Soldiers Accountability Act of 2007. S. 2135 addresses the ongoing struggle to protect children from the horrors of war. The recruitment, enlisting, or conscripting of children in any armed force is unacceptable. Child soldiers face increased mortality rates as well as emotional and psychological damage that are often irreversible. The time has come for the United States to once again uphold justice and stand up for defenseless children who are at risk of losing their childhood, their families, and their physical and emotional well being.

Currently, more than 250,000 child soldiers suffer at the hands of exploitative, ruthless military commanders. Too often, their cries for help are stifled by poverty, ongoing armed conflict, and political instability; it is our responsibility to take up their cause and punish those who have participated in their torment to the extent possible. There is widespread disagreement on the particulars of what might constitute justification for war or aggressive military action, but it is almost universally acknowledged that children should not be used as combatants in such conflicts.

It is imperative that the United States sends a clear and firm message condemning the use of child soldiers and showing our willingness to take the necessary measures to respond to those who would use children in this fashion. Passing S. 2135 is a significant step forward in holding perpetrators accountable for their actions, particularly in light of the fact that the United States has not yet ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which expresses the wide-ranging opposition to the use of minor children as soldiers. Children in any country deserve the same opportunity to succeed and thrive at life; I believe this bill will solidify our commitment to a higher moral standard.

By passing S. 2135 we have the opportunity to join the many nations fighting the scourge of child soldiering which is why I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting S. 2135.

Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee

Party

D

State

TX

I ask my colleagues to enthusiastically support this particular legislation.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee

Party

D

State

TX

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.