Cannon Fodder: The Soldier’s Human Rights

In her Academy project, Mohamed examines how international and domestic legal systems regulate states’ treatment of military service members. International humanitarian and criminal law predominantly focus on a government’s obligations to civilians and adversary combatants, but they leave a state’s own service members largely defenseless against abuses by the states they serve. The traditional idea of soldiers as “cannon fodder” predominates in conventional understandings of the status of soldiers; they are resources to be expended however the state chooses. Their sacrifice may be venerated, but it is unmediated by the law. The advent of human-rights law should have transformed the legal status of service members and bestowed them with rights against the state, but even in human rights law the idea of the soldier as a rights-holder remains unusual. Instead, the soldier is predominantly conceived as a rights violator. The soldier thus occupies two poles: the hero who is expected to lay down their life for the state, or the monster who victimizes innocents. Mohamed’s project examines issues ranging from the incomplete legal treatment of a superior’s orders to commit a crime to the permissive approach to conscription; it also situates the continued understanding of soldiers as cannon fodder within the broader treatment of war within human rights law. Ultimately, it urges a reconceptualization of the relationship of soldiers and the states they serve, and grapples with human rights law’s uncomfortable tolerance of war while rejecting the notion that military service renders a person a resource to be exploited.