Around a dozen U.S. State Department officials have formally accused Secretary of State Rex Tillerson of violating the Child Soldiers Prevention Act, citing his recent decision to exclude Iraq, Afghanistan, and Myanmar from a list of nations currently conscripting child soldiers despite his department’s public acknowledgement that children have been used in combat by these nations.
“Secretary of State Tillerson apparently believes the list is subject to backroom political calculations, rather than facts on the ground and U.S. law.”
—Jo Becker, Human Rights WatchThe accusations were leveled in a confidential “dissent” memo (pdf) obtained and reported on by Reuters for the first time on Tuesday.
“Tillerson’s decision was at odds with a unanimous recommendation by the heads of the State Department’s regional bureaus overseeing embassies in the Middle East and Asia, the U.S. envoy on Afghanistan and Pakistan, the department’s human rights office, and its own in-house lawyers,” Reuters noted.
Passed in 2008, the Child Soldiers Prevention Act’s stated purpose is to bar the U.S. government from arming nations in which anyone under the age of 18 is “recruited, conscripted, or otherwise compelled to serve” as a child soldier.
The Obama administration repeatedly came under fire from human rights groups after it successfully circumvented the federal law by granting “waivers” to Iraq, Myanmar, and several other nations accused of conscripting children, claiming that it was in America’s “national interest” to provide these countries with military assistance.