Justice for the Victims

As a State Party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and a signatory of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Canada has a responsibility to uphold these international legal conventions when formulating carefully crafted policy responses that deal with returning foreign fighters. [...] While the core leadership and fighters are comprised of Iraqi and Syrian nationals, with the UN estimating it still has upwards of 30,000 members in those two countries,4 the group has managed to recruit “41,490 international citizens from 80 countries” to join it in Iraq and Syria, according to a recent report titled “From Daesh to Diaspora: Tracing the Women and Minors of Islamic State”. [...] The logic among some of Canada’s allies appears to be that it is better to eliminate and destroy the “soldiers of the Caliphate” in Iraq and Syria than allow them to return home and wreak havoc, commit terrorist attacks and indoctrinate others to their ideology and cause. [...] As a state party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and a signatory of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Canada has a responsibility to uphold these international legal conventions when formulating carefully crafted policy responses that deal with returning foreign fighters. [...] The definition of genocide in the Rome Statute of the ICC, which is also outlined as article II of the genocide convention, is: Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group con