Citation

Cooper SE. J. Womens Hist. 2002; 14(2): 9-25.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2002, Johns Hopkins University Press)

DOI

10.1353/jowh.2002.0039

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In February 2001, under United Nations (UN) auspices at The Hague, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found three Serbian men guilty of rape and sexual enslavement for their violent abuse, forced impregnation, mutilation, and murder of Muslim women in Foca during the Bosnian War between 1992 and 1995. In the mid-1990s, for the first time in history as well, similar charges were lodged against generals in the gruesome Rwandan war in a trial ( Prosecutor v. Akayesu) presided over by South African jurist Navanetham Pillay under the jurisdiction of the UN-sponsored International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Their guilty verdicts were delivered in 1998, concluding what has been described as the worse human rights abuse case and genocide since World War II. That these cases were even brought before the international tribunals can only be attributed to the relentless determination of an international community of feminist crusaders who haunted diplomats at the UN meetings on human rights in Vienna in 1993 and in 1995-1998 in Rome and the Netherlands, where they had assembled to negotiate a treaty to establish a standing International Criminal Tribunal. These activists, the Women's Caucus for Gender Justice, comprising feminists from every continent, lobbied to insure that the protocols establishing the tribunals included women prosecutors and judges; that the war crimes charges moved well beyond the familiar definitions of genocide used in Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II; and that high crimes and human rights abuses of a broad sexual category be understood to fall under the definition of torture.

define domestic violence and family abuse as forms of torture and...sexual exploitation, domestic violence, family abuse, dowry murder, stoning