Title: Gender and sexual crimes before ad hoc international criminal tribunals

Authors: Agnieszka Szpak

Addresses: Department of International and European Law, Faculty of Political Science and International Studies, Nicolas Copernicus University in Toru?, Poland

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: rape; Rome Statute; International Criminal Court; ICC; ICCt; international treaties; United Nations; UN; sexual crimes; ad hoc tribunals; weapons of war; military objectives; ethnic cleansing; genocide; political terror; community resistance; intimidation; Geneva Convention; international conventions; international law; humanitarian treatment; victims of war; civilians; war zones; sexual violence; international tribunals; criminal tribunals; former Yugoslavia; Yugoslav Republic; Macedonia; ICTY; Rwanda; ICTR; legal codification; international crimes; gender crimes; war crimes; crimes against humanity; jurisprudence; consent; definitional elements; public law; public policy.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPLAP.2011.043856

International Journal of Public Law and Policy, 2011 Vol.1 No.3, pp.284 - 298

Published online: 31 Mar 2015 *

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