Abstract
The author identifies the major goals and achievements in the area of recognizing women as full subjects of human rights and eliminating impunity for gender crimes, highlighting the role of non-governmental organizations ("NGO's"). Until the 1990s sexual violence in war was largely invisible, a point illustrated by examples of the "comfort women" in Japan during the 1930s and 1940s and the initial failure to prosecute rape and sexual violence in the ad hoc international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Due in a significant measure to the interventions by NGOs, the ad hoc international criminal tribunals have brought gender into mainstream international jurisprudence. For example, the Yugoslavia tribunal has devoted substantial resources to the prosecution of rape and explicitly recognized rape as torture, while the Rwanda tribunal has recognized rape as an act of genocide. Elsewhere, the Statute of the International Criminal Court is a landmark in codifying not only crimes of sexual and gender violence as part of the ICC's jurisdiction, but also in establishing procedures to ensure that these crimes and their victims are properly treated. Working towards this end the Women's Caucus for Gender Justice met with significant opposition. It persisted because of the imperative that sexual violence be seen as part of already recognized forms of violence, such as torture and genocide.
Highlights
Justice is heir to a process of women's caucuses, each one created in relation to the recent series of UN conferences to introduce the issue of women and gender
The first task was to write women into human rights at the 1993 Vienna Conference on Human Rights, and to incorporate a women's human rights framework in, and thereby transform, the consensus documents that emerged from the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, the 1995 World Summit on Social Development, and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing
The interrelationship between mobilization at every level and international legal change exemplifies the basic principle that human rights, like law itself, are not autonomous, but rise and fall based on the course and strength of peoples' movements and the popular and political pressure and cultural change they generate
Summary
Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, 12 July 1993, UN Doc. A/CONF.157/23 at paras. 18, 28-30. The interrelationship between mobilization at every level and international legal change exemplifies the basic principle that human rights, like law itself, are not autonomous, but rise and fall based on the course and strength of peoples' movements and the popular and political pressure and cultural change they generate This last decade has been historic in that there has been significant progress in transforming the discourse on a policy level. The offence was against male dignity and honour, or national or ethnic honour In this scenario, women were the object of a shaming attack, the property or objects of others, needing protection perhaps, but not the subjects of rights. Two examples illustrate this point, one from over fifty years ago, one from today
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