ABSTRACT This article draws on the work of North American Black feminist activists and scholars, particularly Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis, alongside other anti-carceral and abolitionist perspectives, to ask what happens when abolition feminism perspectives are brought to international law to study legal responses to the current ecological and climate breakdown. Building upon recent abolition feminist literature and activism against what Braz and Gilmore term the ‘three Ps’, referring to ‘police, pollution, and prisons’, we aim to illuminate and address the connection between transnational criminalisation, capitalism, patriarchal structures, and environmental exploitation. Our argument is that abolition feminism can inspire different legal engagements with the ongoing environmental catastrophe and its uneven racialised and gendered impacts. We identify three key features of abolition feminist thought that are particularly poignant in this regard. The first is abolition feminism’s use of intersectionality, not merely as a tool for better inclusion, but as a way of understanding the interlocking nature of multiple forms of oppression. The second is the ‘both/and’ approach, which embraces what appear as contradictory legal strategies to pursue longer-term political goals. The third is abolition feminism’s critique of the violent nature of racial capitalism that calls for the need to repel the state’s coercive apparatus, while exposing the role that corporations play in fostering extractivism. Whereas the complicity of the international legal order in producing ecological privileges and vulnerabilities has been discussed in the literature, in this article we contend that abolition feminism can offer fresh intellectual tools to develop both a generative critique of international legal approaches to the socio-ecological collapse, particularly those that reproduce a carceral logic, and compelling visions of more liveable societies.

ABSTRACT The criminal law has focused, for the last two centuries, on the relationship between the accused and the State. This has sidelined the interests of the victims in trial procedures. This article adopts a combined theoretical, and historical, approach to offer a way forward in a limited class of cases. The theory of Michel Foucault is deployed with respect to the changing practices of governance, including the current emphasis on objective facts, and the constitution of the self of the individual. The history will be of the role of the jury and the standard of proof. Threading these together allows for a duty – with references to duties already evident in caselaw – to be owed to the victim in sexual assault cases where consent is in issue. That duty is to acknowledge the harm to the self that arises from the assault and the validity of their subjective experience.

ABSTRACT The Inter-American Human Rights System includes what is considered to be a relatively progressive international legal framework to protect gender rights. A strength of the system is its companion framework concerning violence against women, which has been used by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights over the past 20 years to develop advanced norms and jurisprudence on violence against women. Despite this, evidence demonstrates that acts of gender-based discrimination and sexual violence continue to be commonplace throughout Latin America and were exacerbated by COVID-19. Using a case study from Ecuador, this article analyses how norms, specifically those developed by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, are frequently unable to effectively challenge the stereotypes that facilitate school-related gender-based violence. By applying decolonial feminist theory, the article explores the complexities that arise when integrating regional human rights norms at a local level, such as within school communities, and provides a rationale for why decisions of the Inter-American Court may not have had the desired effect of reducing violence against girls in schools. This article ultimately explores the limitations of the Inter-American Human Rights system in promoting change at a community level due to the persistence of underlying gender-based colonial structures.

ABSTRACT This article examines how International Criminal Law (ICL) ‘extracts’ individuals from their communities and families, through imprisonment. ICL is a carceral system that relies on framing accountability in terms of punishment and this extraction. However, the system has many flaws. Drawing on the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore in particular, alongside other abolitionists, this article attempts to map a geography of ICL’s punishment and extraction, by particularly examining the conditions of imprisonment for various categories of detained and imprisoned individuals. This article argues that ICL holds many of the same problems as domestic carceral law – that it rests on racialized logics, individualises guilt to train the eye away from structural causes of conflict, and ultimately ensures a selective impunity – and that it ultimately attempts to address the violence of mass atrocity through a violent process itself, namely imprisonment. The article then argues that instead, we should be looking to transformative justice and an ‘accountability of healing and repair’. In particular, the article examines the student encampments for Gaza as an effort in ‘reconstruction place-making’ to address the atrocities occurring in Gaza.

ABSTRACT Global biodiversity loss requires an assessment of the effectiveness of the existing legal frameworks and the construction of new ones when needed. The subordination of environmental protection to the necessities of economic development has some similarities with the long history of women’s oppression. In this context, feminist studies on women’s empowerment can offer insights for environmental law and policy development. This article seeks to connect the understanding of consent in biodiversity law and feminist legal studies. International environmental law requires obtaining prior informed consent (PIC) for access to genetic resources. Access and benefit sharing is a critical legal instrument for balancing the interests of users of genetic resources (including developed countries and multinational pharmaceutical corporations) with the interests of owners of genetic resources and related knowledge (including developing countries, Indigenous peoples and local communities). This article argues that the translation of understanding of consent from feminist studies to biodiversity law can offer a more nuanced vision of PIC in the latter. Such translation can lead to the development of legal frameworks for obtaining PIC for better protection of the interests of local actors and the environment.

ABSTRACT Recent calls for an abolition movement for international (criminal) law take their grounding in decades of abolition writing built from local and national struggles against incarceration, police brutality and systemic injustice within nation-states, most often the United States, and most influentially from Black feminist writers and organisers. I term this body of collective thinking, action and legacy ‘domestic abolition’. This article examines these two forms of abolition, asking how the international abolition movement should go about engaging with domestic abolition. Framing this around Emory Douglas’s images in a September 1968 edition of The Black Panther, I first read a selection of domestic abolition writers to search for the international dimensions and conditions in their work, moving through the themes of policing, prisons, wars on terror and drugs, borders, historical legacies and finally an expansive cosmological vision of abolitionism. I then use that material to think about how scholar-organisers framing an international (criminal, law) abolition movement might develop their collective thinking and action, and the connections and disconnects between theory and practice at the two levels. I end with an organising sentence to be used and revised together.

ABSTRACT This essay reflects on the brutal realities of incarceration, particularly for Indigenous women in Australia. It begins with the tragic death of Selesa Tafaifa, who was killed in custody, highlighting the inhumanity of the prison system. The authors, both formerly incarcerated, discuss how their personal experiences in prison fuel their abolitionist activism. They critique the prison-industrial complex, describing it as a mechanism of racial and colonial oppression designed to control and erase marginalised communities. The essay emphasises the importance of solidarity, connection, and community within the abolition movement. It also underscores the need for global solidarity, particularly considering the ongoing genocide in Palestine. The authors advocate for a radical transformation of justice, rooted in the expertise of those most affected by the carceral system. Abolition, they argue, is not just theoretical but a necessary and urgent response to the violence and oppression perpetuated by prisons and the state. Through their work, Lean and Kilroy strive to honour those who have died in custody and to create a world where such injustices no longer occur.

ABSTRACT This article is an inquiry into the limits of international criminal law (ICL) to pursue feminist goals. It argues that international criminal courts and tribunals have failed to prosecute intra-group sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) crimes because they continue to define groups targeted with a discriminative motive. Despite the achievements of an intersectional analysis that captures the distinctiveness of SGBV cutting across different ethnic, racial, or religious identities, ICL frequently conflates or ignores intra-group SGBV, which then precipitates the marginalisation of certain victims. In an effort to exemplify and recalibrate how intersectionality for intra-group SGBV can be incorporated within ICL, the article turns to SGBV by the Islamic State (IS) and proposes to reconsider who are the ‘other’ victims of SGBV crimes. The article demonstrates the urgent need to further the intersectional lens in order to include intra-group SGBV and thus prevent the exclusion of a substantial number of SGBV victims, which requires political as well as legal feminist advocacy.

ABSTRACT The following is an edited version of an Author Meets Readers conversation held on 20 February 2025 at UNSW Sydney celebrating Ann Genovese’s book Feminist Jurisography: Law, History, Writing (Routledge, 2023). The event chaired by Mehera San Roque brought author Ann Genovese into dialogue with three readers, Ann Curthoys, Alecia Simmonds and Angela Kintominas.