Nepal’s Supreme Court on Friday ordered the registration of a writ petition against Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’, the then-chairman of the rebel Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), for war crimes for using children as Maoist soldiers during the decade-long war against the monarchy.

Lenin Bista, a former child soldier, approached the apex court with a writ petition claiming that the then-leadership breached international humanitarian law by using child soldiers in the Maoists’ war against the Himalayan nation’s monarchy. He demanded the prosecution of the leadership of the then CPN-M, including Prachanda and former Prime Minister Dr Baburam Bhattarai, arguing that it was a war crime to force unintelligent minors like him as child soldiers and forcefully expel them from the camp as disqualified combatants.

Prachanda was chief of the erstwhile rebel Maoist party and Bhattarai second-in-command. On Friday, a single bench led by Justice Dr Ananda Mohan Bhattarai issued the order to register the writ, according to Supreme Court sources.

Earlier, Bista’s writ petition was dismissed by the Supreme Court, following which he approached the court against its dismissal. The United Nations Mission in Nepal had disqualified 4,008 soldiers of the Peoples Liberation Army of then-rebel CPN-M, saying they were minors and late recruits. During the verification that ended in December 2007, it was found that 2,972 guerrillas were minors, while 1,036 were recruited into the Nepal Army under the army integration process in accordance with the Comprehensive Peace Accord signed in 2006 when the Maoists joined politics by laying down arms.