From Dec.6, 2018 13:00 until 15:00

At World Forum, Africa Room, The Hague, Netherlands

The Global Justice Center is proud to participate in this side event for the 17th Session of the Assembly of States Parties to the International Criminal Court hosted by the American Bar Association (ABA) and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH).

The roundtable discussion will focus on current and upcoming challenges faced by the International Criminal Court, and the ways in which the Court’s recent work has confronted and responded to pressing global challenges. Experts will discuss issues posed by recent criticism of the Court from those implicated in its examinations and investigations, the increasingly diverse range of examinations and investigations undertaken through the Court and other global criminal justice processes, and opportunities for accountability posed by the Court’s recent cases and decisions, including in Afghanistan and Myanmar.

Speakers:

• Katherine Gallagher, Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights
• Amb Stephen Rapp, Visting Fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and former US Ambassador-at-large for Global Criminal Justice
• Michael Greco, former President of the ABA, and current Chair of the ABA's ICC Project
• Akila Radhakrishnan, President of the Global Justice Center
• Kate Vigneswaran, Senior Legal Advisor at the International Commission of Jurists

Moderator:

• Christopher (“Kip”) Hale, Atrocity Crimes Attorney and Term Member, Council on Foreign Relations

Executive Summary

Gender permeates the crime of genocide. It is woven into the perpetrators’ planning and commission of coordinated acts that make up the continuum of genocidal violence. It is through these gendered annihilative acts that perpetrators maximize the crime’s destructive impact on protected groups.

Female and male members of targeted groups, by the perpetrators’ own design, experience genocide in distinct ways by reason of their gender. Men and older boys are targeted as a consequence of the gendered roles they are perceived to inhabit, including those as heads of households, leaders, religious authorities, protectors, guardians of the group’s identity, and patriarchs. Assaults on women and girls pay heed to their roles as mothers, wives, daughters, bearers of future life, keepers of community’s and family’s honor, and sources of labor within the home. An understanding of what it means to be male and female in a particular society thus saturates perpetrators’ conceptions of their victims, and of themselves. In particular, the violence directed at women and girls during genocide is fed by existing misogynistic attitudes in society, and the traumatic impacts are magnified by the financial, social, cultural inequalities to which women and girls are subjected. 

Genocide is often understood as a crime committed predominantly through organized mass killings—the majority of victims of which, both historically and today, tend to be male. Consequently, non-killing acts of genocide—more likely to be directed against female members of a protected group—are often cast out of the continuum of genocidal violence. Equally, in privileging the act of killing, other acts of violence committed against men and boys—such as torture, rape, and enslavement—have also been obscured.

By: Sofia Garcia

Every year starting on November 25^th, the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence Campaign begins. Since 1991, the fight against gender-based violence has been immortalized from November 25^th until December 10^th in hopes of galvanizing action to end violence against women and girls worldwide. This year’s #HearMeToo theme is a continuation of this year’s legacy of powerful social media-based movements such as #MeToo, #TimesUp, #NiUnaMenos, #BalanceTonPorc, and #NotOneMore. With the ongoing Rohingya genocide a clear example of the urgent need for frameworks that hold perpetrators of sexual violence in conflict accountable, a call to action on gender-based violence, challenging the impunity that allows it to reoccur and escalate, is more important than ever. Under this theme, the UNiTE Campaign to end violence against women seeks to bring activists, policy makers, and the public to the table in order to foster opportunities for dialogue. 

November 25^th kicks off the campaign with the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and culminates with International Human Rights Day, which sends a powerful message: universal enjoyment of human rights cannot possibly be accomplished until women and girls live in a world free of fear and violence. Raising awareness and encouraging action on gender-based violence worldwide is an important step in the fight towards gender equality. Until women and girls can exist safely without fear of violence, we must continue to discuss the need for policies for preventing and ending assaults on women based on their gender. The days highlighted in the campaign were a deliberate effort to highlight the link between violence against women and girls and human rights violations.  Besides recognizing November 25^th as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, the campaign also includes other significant dates such as:

• November 29^th, International Women Human Rights Defenders Day
• December 1^st, World AIDS Day;
• December 6^th, which marks the Anniversary of the Montreal Massacre.

I. Intro

The Global Justice Center, international human rights organization, welcomes the International Law Commission’s (“ILC”) decision to codify crimes against humanity to form the basis of a potential Convention. Unlike war crimes and genocide, crimes against humanity are not codified in a treaty outside the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (“Rome Statute”). The development of a treaty on the basis of the ILC’s draft articles presents the opportunity to monitor and enforce the provisions outside of the limited jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (“ICC” or “the Court”) and to encourage states to enact national legislation.

Given the unique and powerful opportunity the ILC has to combat impunity and codify progressive standards of international law, the Global Justice Center (“GJC”) believes it is essential to do more than merely replicate the language of the Rome Statute. We call on the ILC to take the opportunity to reflect the progress made and lessons learned in the 20 years since the Rome Statute was adopted, particularly with regard to gender. Specifically, we ask the ILC to reconsider for the purposes of the draft Convention, two specific instances where the Rome Statute has differential treatment of gender-related provisions relative to their non-gendered counterparts: (1) the formulation of the crime of forced pregnancy; and (2) the definition of gender.

Download the Full Letter