Sexual and Gender Based Violence in International Law: Making International Institutions Work by H. Desai Bharat and Mandal Moumita. Singapore: Springer Nature, 2022. xvii + 283 pp. Hardcover: €99.99; eBook: €85.59. doi:10.1007/9789811908941 (original) (raw)
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International Criminal Law Review, 2017
In March 2016, the International Criminal Court (icc) rendered a guilty verdict against Jean-Pierre Bemba, ex-president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, for his involvement in operations in the Central African Republic from 2002 to 2004. He was found guilty in his capacity as military commander of crimes against humanity and war crimes. The decision is the first by the icc to address sexual violence as a weapon of war and in the context of command responsibility. This article assesses the Bemba decision from a feminist perspective. Key normative developments have occurred in the substantive international criminal law surrounding sexual violence, and the guilty verdict against Jean-Pierre Bemba represents an effective implementation of international criminal law. However, in light of major feminist concerns that arise in international law on sexual violence, the encouraging developments in the judgement occur mostly at the implementation level, leaving much to be done in terms of gender conceptualization and norm-setting. Keywords sexual violence-international criminal law-feminist perspectives-Bemba case-International Criminal Court (icc)-war crimes-crimes against humanity-rape On 21 March, the International Criminal Court (icc) rendered a guilty verdict against Jean-Pierre Bemba, ex-president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, for his involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Central African Republic during a 2002-2004 operation. He was found guilty
Managing Violence: Can the ICC Prevent Sexual Violence in Conflict?
2017
and sexual violence at alarming levels in con icts of various natures. 14 State military, guerrillas, and paramilitaries have used rape as a weapon of civil war in Colombia for more than y years. 15 Tens of thousands of women, girls, men, and boys have been raped in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where con ict has raged for more than twenty years, engendering what United Nations experts call a culture of daily violence of "genocidal proportions. " 16 Former Iraqi prisoners held at the now infamous Abu Ghraib prison accused American soldiers of forced sexual acts and threats of rape. 17 Unfortunately, these incidents represent just a few of many more instances. While the character of sexual violence in con ict is as varied as the geography of con ict itself-including mass rape enacted either by policy or through license, 18 the sexual humiliation and assault of prisoners, 19 and "bad apple" soldiers organizing the gang rape and murder of civilians 20-no form of sexual violence can ever be justi ed as a legal part of con ict. In sharp contrast to other violence in warfare-such as targeting, shooting, and killing the designated enemy in compliance with the rules for applying lethal force-there is no legal basis for committing sexual violence in con ict. e law of armed con ict strictly prohibits rapes as a tactic, weapon, or outcome of con ict. 21 And yet despite the widespread and persistent nature of these crimes, prosecuting sexual violence as a crime under international law is a late-twentieth-century development. In this sense, the Rome Statute, the actions of the ICC prosecutor, and the trial judgments emerging from the ICC represent an unprecedented international legal condemnation of sexual violence in con ict.
Feminist Perspectives on the International Prosecution of Conflict-related Gender-based Crimes
Journal of International Criminal Justice, 2022
Feminist legal scholars played a prominent role in surfacing gender-based crimes and developing the international criminal justice system in the last three decades, from as early as the first horrific reports of the systematic mass rape of mainly Bosnian Muslim women throughout the Yugoslav dissolution war of 1992–1995. Due to the failure of the international criminal tribunals and courts to adequately prosecute wartime rape and other forms of sexual violence in the past three decades, gender-based crimes were inflicted on a massive scale as an integral part of ethnic and civil armed conflicts, by both enemies and supporters, in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Sierra Leone, and other countries recently torn by sectarianism and civil war, particularly Libya and Syria. As a result of the rampant mass rape that prevailed in conflicts over the past three decades, international criminal law has witnessed unprecedented developments, including the emergence of several ad hoc international criminal courts (ICCs) and tribunals, as well as the establishment of the ICC. These prosecuted wartime rape and other forms of sexual violence, for the first time, as crimes of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Simultaneously, this period has witnessed the publication of substantial legal scholarship underlining these developments, including the books under review. The significance of these carefully selected books lies in their study of the above crimes from several doctrinal and methodological angles, which together constitute an in-depth analysis that answers many complex questions about what these crimes are, why they are committed, how to resist them, how to bring perpetrators to justice, as well as the obstacles to accountability that have helped perpetrators enjoy impunity.
Crimes of Sexual Violence within International Criminal Law: A Historical Outline
Journal of Programming Languages, 2020
This article will provide a synoptic historical outline of international criminal law (ICL) from a gender perspective. An effort is made to highlight the landmark stages in the evolution of the ICL, particularly in its treatment of rape and other sexual crimes perpetrated against women during armed conflict. For this purpose, a critical examination of Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, criminal tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda as well as Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the International Criminal Court is attempted. Endeavour is to outline the gender and sexual crimes jurisprudence developed by the above mentioned international criminal tribunals as well as courts, and then to examine its effectiveness in prosecuting crimes of rape and sexual violence carried out against women. An analysis of what might have gone wrong within the ICL in dealing with rape and crimes of sexual nature is also attempted.
Criminal Law Forum, 2014
This article discusses aspects of the origin and development of jurisprudence relating to the prosecution of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in the context of international criminal law. It examines a selection of archival material from the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) and other bodies connected to it, noting that the UNWCC was the first multinational criminal law organization to explicitly endorse SGBV crimes as international crimes. UNWCCsupported trials in both Europe and Asia suggest that rape committed in the context of armed conflict or situations of mass violence was punishable as a serious crime nearly 70 years ago. Moreover, many of the theories of liability used by contemporary tribunals today were used in the UNWCC-supported cases. The authors maintain that the UNWCC archives are not only valuable for tribunals prosecuting conflict-related SGBV cases today, but the jurisprudence emerging from UNWCCsupported cases may also be quite relevant to contemporary policy debates.
Gender and sexual crimes before ad hoc international criminal tribunals
Rape has been regarded as a weapon of war, a tool used to achieve military objectives such as ethnic cleansing, genocide, spreading political terror, breaking the resistance of a community, intimidation or extraction of information. The 1949 Geneva Conventions do not refer to acts of sexual violence as a 'grave breach'. The 1990s saw the establishment of the two flagship international criminal institutions -the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) as well as codification of rape and other sexual violence as among the gravest international crimes in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The purpose of this paper is on the one hand to point to the achievements of the ad hoc international criminal tribunals in the recognition of gender crimes as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide and on the other, to indicate that there have been some mischaracterisations and misunderstandings in their jurisprudence, particularly as to the issue of consent of the victim of rape as definitional element of that crime.
2017
The following work shall critique the bodies of the laws of armed conflict and international criminal law for their inadequacy in addressing sexual assault during wartime through inappropriate measures to define, incorporate, and progressively interpret international statute to encompass sexual assault as a global crime. In order to illustrate this point one provides a socio-historic examination of the international legal development of sexual assault and an analysis of what makes it a ‘gendered’ crime. The second section shall then critically assess attempts to prohibit sexual assault in the Geneva Conventions, and how its recognition and prosecution under ‘grave breaches’ can be problematic. The third section then examines the decisions made at the ICTY and ICTR to define rape under “greater” crimes such as genocide and crimes against humanity. The overall evaluation of the above shall provide a socio-legal account of the woman’s subordinate and decentralized status in internatio...
Sexual And Gender Based Crimes In International Criminal Law: Moving Forwards Or Backwards?
2015
Prosecution of sexual violence in international criminal law requires not only an understanding of the mechanisms employed to prosecute sexual violence but also a critical analysis of the factors facilitating perpetuation of such crimes in armed conflicts. The extrapolations laid out in this essay delve into the jurisprudence of international criminal law pertaining to sexual and gender based violence followed by the core question of this essay – has the entrenchment of sexual violence as international crimes in the Rome Statute been successful to address such violence in armed conflicts?