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Enhancing Accountability for Attacks on Education: Guidance on Investigating and Prosecuting Education-Related Crimes

Attachments

This Guide is structured in three parts:

Chapter I briefly explains what attacks on education are and summarizes the key provisions for the protection of education from attack under IHL and IHRL, before addressing key trends and patterns of different forms of attacks on education. In so doing, it seeks to make an evidence-based case for the greater consideration of education-related crimes by domestic and international accountability mechanisms, in light of their scale, gravity, and devastating impacts on the lives of victims and affected communities.

Chapter II sets out the main reported challenges to investigating and prosecuting education-related crimes at the national and international level and offers some strategies and solutions to overcome or mitigate them. These include: ensuring that education-related crimes are expressly criminalized in domestic law; making multi-disciplinary expertise available to investigation and prosecution teams; and effectively cooperating with CSOs who are often the ‘first responders’ to crimes against education. This Chapter also offers guidance on the type of evidence that may be relevant to establishing the commission of education-related crimes.

Chapter III provides an overview of some of the legal charges that may be available in respect to education-related crimes under the Rome Statute. It is beyond the scope of this Guide to comprehensively address the myriad of potential charges that may be available and have already been the subject of considerable analysis, including: willful killing; murder; attacking civilians and civilian objects; torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence; and using, conscripting, and enlisting children. Rather this Guide focuses on two specific crimes which have received comparatively less attention, namely attacking buildings dedicated to education as a war crime, and the severe deprivation of the right to education as the crime against humanity of persecution. The law relating to the contextual elements of international crimes, or to modes of liability, is not considered.

GCPEA is cognizant that criminal justice - and broader accountability measures - cannot offer complete answers to the complex problem of attacks on education in conflict. However, beyond providing recognition and redress to individual victims as rights holders, criminal investigations and prosecutions can serve broader goals, including enforcing and upholding the rule of law and preventing and deterring future attacks. The aim of this Guide is to contribute to those efforts.