Violence against women during armed conflict - a war crime or genocide?

Abstract

The issue is considered, which aims to establish the connection between violence against women and armed conflict and to determine the different degrees of severity of this crime in international law and in national criminal legislation.The analysis of modern international relations shows that humanity has not yet managed to get rid of wars and other armed conflicts, which are mostly armed conflicts of a non-international nature. This is evidenced by the events in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Iraq, Liberia, and the Caucasus, and since 2014 Ukraine has not been an exception, the international armed conflict on whose territory since February 24, 2022 has grown into a full-scale war waged by the Russian Federation on the scale of which Europe has not knew since the Second World War.Modern international relations are characterized by a change in the nature of the conflict, the emergence of a number of new categories and situations, an increase in the number of victims among the civilian population, and the increasing internationalization of armed conflicts of a non-international nature. In this regard, the question of the qualification of various manifestations of genocide is extremely relevant, especially in the conditions of the ongoing full-scale war unleashed by Russia.Special attention is paid by the author to the provisions of the statute of the International Criminal Court and the statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which essentially form the modern doctrine of criminal responsibility for war crimes and the crime of genocide.It is worth noting that violence against a woman appears as a war crime in most cases when participants in a military conflict commit acts that constitute the crime of rape for personal purposes, but as soon as these acts appear within the policy or plan of the leadership, they are committed by order of the command and for the purpose of intimidation, in the context of ethnic cleansing, inflicting severe psychological trauma, extermination of a certain group of people united by any features that are common to such a group and identify it, we can clearly speak about the presence of a crime against humanity in the actions of criminals and genocide. We must also state that violence against women was and remains an integral element of armed conflict, and unlike the precedent of the terrible rampant violence witnessed by the world community in the former Yugoslavia, which became known mainly thanks to the work of the Tribunal, other armed conflicts do not give us such the completeness of consideration of the scale of violence against women, since these crimes are ignored, and due to the lack of an effective mechanism for bringing criminals to justice, we do not have the ability to assess the full scale of crimes committed against women during the conflict. There is hope that this situation will change, since the IСС is functioning, which should effectively resolve such situations.This article actually confirms the relevance of the application of international humanitarian law in national legislation and points to significant gaps that cannot be filled without the help of international law as a whole.With his work, the author tries to draw the attention of domestic legislators to the problems of implementing international humanitarian law into the national law of Ukraine, and to single out the most important directions in this area.