BeIR/webis-touche2020 huggingface dataset:
Universal rights and collective compromises

As noted above, the definition of adulthood accepted within western liberal democracies is not a cultural absolute. It can be argued that the legal cut-off point- be it sixteen, eighteen or twenty-one years of age- is largely arbitrary. Children who care for disabled parents take on adult responsibilities inconceivable to many undergraduate students. Many developing world cultures would regard the under-emphasis of practical skills and physical training that exists in the education systems of knowledge-based western economies to be tantamount to neglect. In both war-torn Afghanistan and peaceful Botswana, a boy of fourteen is considered old enough and able enough to hunt; to protect his younger siblings; to marry or to be responsible for a harvest. Why should an Afghani child or his parents be condemned for allowing him to participate in the defence of his community? A family in a similar position in Botswana may never have been confronted with that choice. Although they might find the idea appalling in peace-time, the pressing necessity of war can cause opinions and beliefs to become highly flexible. This restatement of cultural relativism goes hand in hand with side proposition’s concluding objection. Although a culture can quickly assimilate and normalise necessary practices- such as arming children- it need not think that they are objectively good and valuable. It may be keen to abandon the practice. A community that responds to an urgent need to arm children may not want to arm children. Side opposition regard the use of child soldiers as symptomatic of cultural depravity, of a callous attitude to suffering. This approach patronises communities subject to privations and abuses now unknown in the west. It assumes that traditions cannot be overturned and that societies in the developing world will hasten to use their children as cannon-fodder for without devoting any thought or debate to the risks involved.
Cultural relativism and adapting to conflict

The issues underlying all debates on child soldiers go to the very heart of intercultural justice, politics and governance. International and supranational legislation notwithstanding, the notion that children should be protected from all forms of violence at any cost is expressly western. The facts stated in the introduction are not sufficient to support the creation of a defence of cultural relativism to charges of recruiting and using child soldiers. “Cultures” are not simply sets of practices defined by history and tradition. They are also methods of living, of survival and of ordering societies that change and develop in response to societies’ environments. Within many communities, children are inducted (or induct themselves) into military organisations as a result of necessity. The traditional providers of physical safety within a society may have been killed or displaced by war. Communities left vulnerable by long running and vaguely defined conflicts may have no other option but to begin arming their children, in order to help them avoid violent exploitation. A great many child soldiers in South Sudan actively sought out units of the rebel army known to accept child recruits[i]. Following the death of parents and the dispersal of extended families, children gravitated towards known sources of safety and strength – organisations capable of providing protection and independence within nations utterly distorted and ruined by conflict. Western notions of inviolate childhood, free of worry and violence, are merely a cultural construct. This construct cannot be duplicated in societies beset by forms of privation and conflict that have been alien to western liberal democracies for the last seventy years. Attempting to enforce this construct as law- and as a form of law that can trump domestic legislation- endangers vulnerable communities, inhibits the creation of democratic norms and can even criminalise the children it claims to protect. [i] “Raised by war: Child Soldiers of the Southern Sudanese Second Civil War”, Christine Emily Ryan, PhD Thesis, University of London, 2009
The cultural construction of armed conflict

The jurisdiction of the ICC is primarily exercised according to culturally constructed assumptions about the way war works – that there will be a clear division between aggressors and defenders, that armies will be organised according to chains of command, the civilians will not be targeted and will be evacuated from conflict zones. But countless conflicts in Africa and central Asia have proven these assumptions to be flawed. It should not be forgotten that almost all formulations of this motion define cultural relativism only as a defence to the use of child soldiers. It will still be open for ICC prosecutors to prove that the use of child soldiers has been systematic, pernicious and deliberate, rather than the product of uncertainty, necessity and unstable legal norms. Moreover, not all defences are “complete” defences; they do not all result in acquittal, and are often used by judges to mitigate the harshness of certain sentences. It can be argued that it was never intended for the ICC to enforce laws relating to child soldiers against other children or leaders of vulnerable communities who acted under the duress of circumstances. At the very least, those responsible for arming children in these circumstances should face a more lenient sentence than a better-resourced state body that used child soldiers as a matter of policy. Due to the nature of conflicts in developing nations, where the geographic influence of “recognised” governments is limited, and multiple local law-making bodies may contribute to an armed struggle, it is difficult for the international community to directly oversee combat itself. United Nations troops are often underfunded, unmotivated and poorly trained, being sourced primarily from the same continent as the belligerent parties in a conflict. When peacekeepers are deployed from western nations, their rules of engagement have previously prevented robust protection of civilian populations. Ironically, this is partly the result of concerns that western states might be accused of indulging in neo-colonialism. It is outrageous for the international community to dictate standards of war-time conduct to communities and states unable to enforce them, while withholding the assistance and expertise that might allow them to do so. Therefore, the ICC, as a specialist legal and investigative body, should be encouraged to use the expertise it has accumulated to distinguish between child military participation driven by a desire to terrorise populations or quickly reinforce armies, and child military participation that has arisen as a survival strategy.
Making children military targets

The purpose of the ban on the use of child soldiers is to prevent the normalisation of such tactics in conflict zones. It is not an inflexible implementation of a lofty European ideal. The ban, and the role of the ICC in enforcing it, is designed to reduce the likelihood that civilians will be deliberately targeted in developing world war zones. Why is this necessary? If the defence set out in the motion is used to reduce the number of war crimes convictions attendant on the use of child soldiers, not only will numbers of child soldiers rise, but children themselves will become military targets. Communities ravaged and depleted by war, under the status quo, may be seen as minimally threatening. Armies are not likely to target them as strategic objectives if it is thought that they will offer no resistance. However, if there is no condemnation and investigation of the use of child soldiers, they will become a much more common feature of the battlefield. The increasing militarisation of children will make those children who do not wish to participate in armed conflict- children pursuing some alternate survival strategy- automatic targets. All children will be treated as potential soldiers. The communities that children live in will become military targets. The resolution, although seeking to enable children to protect themselves, will simply make them targets of the massacres, organised displacement and surprise attacks that characterise warfare in Africa and central Asia.
Punishing objectively harmful conduct

Of the tens of thousands of children exposed to armed conflict throughout the world, most are recruited into armed political groups. Quite contrary to the image of child soldiers constructed by the proposition, these youngsters are not de-facto adults, nor are they seeking to defend communities who will be in some way grateful for their contributions and sacrifices. Child soldiers join groups with defined political and military objectives. Children may volunteer for military units after encountering propaganda. Many children join up to escape social disintegration within their communities. Several female child soldiers have revealed that they joined because to escape domestic violence or forced marriage. Many children who do not volunteer can be forcibly abducted by military organisations. One former child soldier from Congo reported that “they gave me a uniform and told me that now I was in the army. They said that they would come back and kill my parents if I didn’t do as they said.”[i] Once inducted into the army, children are vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. They are usually viewed as expendable, employed as minesweepers or spies. The inexperience and gullibility of children is used to convince them that they are immune to bullets, or will be financially rewarded for committing atrocities. Many children are controlled through the use of drugs, to which they inevitably become addicted[ii]. For every account the proposition can provide of a child who took up arms to defend his family, there are many more children who were coerced or threatened into becoming soldiers. Whatever standard of relativist morality side proposition may choose to employ, actions and abuses of the type described above are object4ively harmful to children. Moreover, the process of turning a child into a soldier is irreversible and often more brutal and dehumanising than combat itself. Proposition concedes that child soldiers will be in need of care and treatment after demobilising, but they underestimate the difficulty of healing damage this horrific. The use of child soldiers is an unpardonable crime, which creates suffering of a type universally understood to be unnecessary and destructive. It should not be diluted or justified by relativist arguments. It would undermine the ICC’s role in promoting universal values if officers and politicians complicit in the abuses described above were allowed to publicly argue cultural relativism as their defence. Moreover, it would give an unacceptable air of legitimacy to warlords and brigands seeking to operate under the pretence of leading legitimate resistance movements [i] Child Soldiers International, http://www.child-soldiers.org/home [ii] “Child Soldiers: Global Report 2008”, Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, 2007, p299, http://www.childsoldiersglobalreport.org/files/country_pdfs/FINAL_2008_Global_Report.pdf
Universal rights and collective compromises

Cultural relativism is the philosophical belief that all cultures and cultural beliefs are of equal value and that right and wrong are relative and dependant on cultural contexts. Accordingly, relativists hold that universal human rights cannot exist, as there are no truly universal human values. If rights are relative, the laws that protect them must also be relative. If we accept proposition’s contention that culturally relative values can evolve in response to conflicts and crises, then any perverse or destructive behaviour given the force of ritual and regularity by a group’s conduct can be taken to be relative. If the group believes that a practice is right, if it ties into that group’s conception of what is just and good or beneficial to their survival, then there can be no counter argument against it – whether that practice has been continuous for a hundred years or a hundred days. Systems of law, however, reflect the opinions, practices and values of everyone within a state’s territory, no matter how plural its population may be. Similarly, objections to specific aspects of the universal human rights doctrine are fragmentary, not collective. While a handful of communities in Yemen may object to a ban on the use of child soldiers, many more throughout the world would find this a sensible and morally valuable principle. It is necessary for both the international community and individual nation states to adjust their laws to reconcile the competing demands of plural value systems. Occasionally, a value common among a majority of cultures must overrule the objections of the minority. It is perverse to give charismatic leaders who convince impoverished communities to send their sons and daughters into combat an opportunity to use cultural relativism to excuse their culpability for what would otherwise be a war crime. Officers, politicians or dissident commanders are much more likely than Yemeni tribesmen or orphaned Sudanese boys to understand the intricacies of such a defence, and much more likely to abuse it. The commanders of child soldiers are the only class of individuals who should fear the ICC.
Cultural relativism and adapting to conflict

Side proposition are attempting to make an argument in favour of reforming the ICC’s prosecution guidelines, but are doing so in terms of the culturally relative definition of adulthood. In other words, side proposition are trying to discuss war, realpolitik and international justice using the language of social anthropology. This approach is flawed. Arguments about the appropriate age to allow a child to hunt, to leave school or to marry pale beside the life-and-death significance of participation in warfare. A child does not become an adult by acting like a soldier, and those who recruit children into military organisations do not necessarily view them as adults. Indeed, children are seen as easy targets for recruitment, due to their emotional immaturity, their gullibility and deference to those who wield authority. Children may join armed groups out of necessity, and in the interests of survival, but this does not mean that those armed groups should accept child volunteers, or should escape criminal liability when they do so. Although the west is now a safe and prosperous place to live, the categories of war crime that the ICC prosecutes were created in response to the depravity and ruthlessness of conflicts that liberal-democracies experienced directly. The developed, liberal democratic world is not blind to the sense of necessity that drives children to take up arms. However, it understands only too well that child soldiers are unnecessary. Children do not autonomously organise into armed militias – they are recruited by states and groups with defined political and military objectives. Such groups should be aware that there is no value or necessity underlying the use of children in combat, and should be made legally accountable when they flaunt this norm.
Google will help Chinese internet freedom more by staying

Staying will not help Chinese internet freedom at all If google.cn was to be left uncensored, then within a short period, google.cn would lose its license to operate and will be pulled down. Chinese internet users will then have to rely either on Baidu, which provides more or less the same results as Google, or will have to try to break through the blockades of the Great Firewall to reach the Hong Kong-based Google. If Google does censor itself, it will only state ‘some results have not been shown’ – Chinese citizens still won’t know what has been hidden. Unless they then try to access the Hong Kong based Google, but then the Great Firewall will stop them anyway. Either way, Chinese citizens will be blocked from seeing what their government doesn’t want them to see, so what’s the difference? Google might as well stick to its principles and not censor itself.
As a business, Google shouldn’t interfere with domestic politics

Google’s business is inseparable from basic human rights The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), a UN conference, affirmed that access to information is a basic human right, a corollary to the freedom of opinion and expression as articulated in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.[1] It is a right because access to information is often basic to human life; to how to live in society, to work and to educate ourselves. China ratified the Universal Declaration back in 1948 when it was accepted by the UN’s General Assembly, and was a party to the WSIS 2003 conference. This means that, if China is to be a responsible member of the international community, we can expect them to uphold the principles they publicly declare. Google’s mission is ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. Note that this mission happens to coincide with the basic human right of access to information. This is why Google’s choice to interfere with China’s domestic politics isn’t just ‘big business interfering with a state’s sovereign politics’ – it’s a case of a big business whose business model happens to be providing a basic human right the sovereign state should have, by its own accord, provided a long time ago. [1] World Summit on the Information Society, ‘Declaration of Principles. Building the Information Society: a global challenge in the new Millennium’, December 12, 2003. URL: http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/official/dop.html  Last consulted: December 22, 2011
Not censoring its search results is a victory for human rights

The problem with Google censoring its results, is that in doing so, it is complicit in China’s repression of free speech: it adapts its own search engine to display only the results the Chinese government wants, thereby limiting its citizens’ basic human right to free access to information (a corollary to free speech). By avoiding this complicity, Google is taking a bold, praiseworthy step towards enhancing respect for human rights in China and with it, Google can set an important example for other businesses with dealings in China.[1] [1] Human Rights Watch, ‘China: Google Challenges Censorship’, January 12, 2010. URL: http://www.hrw.org/node/87654
Not censoring helps Google’s business proposition and corporate identity

Google’s corporate motto is ‘don’t be evil’. This is partly an issue of corporate identity, and partly a clever business proposition. In both cases, complying with Chinese censorship rules damages Google as a company. The key to Google’s dominance in the search market is that users know Google will always deliver the search results most relevant to them. By adhering to censorship laws, users will trust the relevance of Google’s search results less, which hence erodes Google’s business position as users will be more likely to try alternative search engines.[1] [1] Rebecca Blood, ‘Google's China decision is pragmatic, not idealistic’, January 2010. URL: http://www.rebeccablood.net/archive/2010/01/im_neither_as_impressed_with.html
Not censoring puts global pressure on China to change its free speech policies

Google’s decision to stop censoring was world news, and has put internet freedom on everyone’s agenda – even so much so, that U.S. Secretary of State mentioned internet companies ganging up to censor the Chinese corner of the internet specifically as a threat to freedom worldwide in a recent speech.[1] This helps to inform ordinary citizens of other countries who may not know about the ‘great firewall’ what the Chinese government is doing. By making a high-profile decision like this, and by engaging and informing the governments and publics of free and democratic countries like this, Google increases the public and political pressure on China to change its ways. [1] Hillary Clinton, ‘Conference on Internet Freedom’, December 8, 2011. URL: http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2011/12/178511.htm
Google can’t afford to abandon the Chinese market

In 2010, the search market in China was valued at $1.7 billion and was expected to grow at an average of 50% per year for the coming few years.[1] After the 2010 incident, Google has been losing market share in China rapidly.[2] From a business perspective, Google just can’t afford to miss out on such a business opportunity: not only will it miss entering this market when it is growing, it will also forfeit a comfortable position in the search market from which it can build its other businesses, like gmail and android, the way it does in other countries.[3] [1] Melanie Lee, ‘Analysis: A year after China retreat, Google plots new growth’, Reuters, January 13, 2011. URL: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/13/us-google-china-idUSTRE70C1X820110113 [2] Reuters, ‘Google search share slips as Baidu gains report’, July 26, 2010, URL: http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/07/26/us-online-search-market-idUSTRE66M3LI20100726 [3] Kyle Baxter, ‘Android isn’t about building a mobile platform’, January 4, 2011. URL: http://tightwind.net/2011/01/android-isnt-about-building-a-mobile-platform/ Last consulted: December 22, 2011
Google will help Chinese internet freedom more by staying

As Google itself argued in 2006 when it first entered the Chinese domestic market; when Google is fully present in China, it can at least do its very best to allow its Chinese users as much access to all the information that Chinese users are allowed to look up. By expanding their access, Google can at least contribute to a broadening of the amount of information Chinese internet users can gather. The alternative is them relying on an even more censored Chinese search engine called Baidu, or having them try to access a heavily blocked, slowed down, restricted and monitored version of Google outside of China, for example google.com or the Hong Kong-based Google.com.hk. Having a locally accessible version of Google that is censored might not be optimal, but it’s better than nothing.[1] [1] Karen Wickre, ‘Testimony: The Internet in China’, February 15, 2006. URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/testimony-internet-in-china.html Last consulted: December 22, 2011
As a business, Google shouldn’t interfere with domestic politics

Business is business and politics is politics – and the two shouldn’t mingle. When a company wants to operate in a foreign country, it should respect the government and its regulations. We require the same when a company wants to operate within our territory: suppose a big Chinese company came to our home country and suddenly started criticizing our domestic policies – these are the policies of the sovereign state whose territory it is, and outsiders have no place to tell it how to run itself.[1] [1] Nicholas Deleon, TechChrunch, ‘China has every right to be upset with Google right now’, March 23, 2010. URL: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/23/china-has-every-right-to-be-upset-with-google-right-now/ Last consulted: December 22, 2011