The jurisdiction of the African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples' Rights (acjhpr) will include international crimes of conflict-related sexual violence (crsv). This article explores the challenges the Court is likely to face in building regional and national accountability for crsv, by considering the lessons that might be learnt from the experiences of the former Yugoslavia in prosecuting these crimes. The article focuses on the two key challenges of developing 'best practice' within regional and national courts, and of linking these prosecutions to peace processes and post-conflict reconstruction. To address these challenges, the article argues for a 'gender justice framework' of guiding principles to ensure effective and equitable crsv prosecutions.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has generated huge archival holdings. With the ICTY's impending closure, the archive has become part of broader debates regarding its legacy for the former Yugoslavia. In particular, the memorial function of this archive has now become highly contentious. Ultimately, these concern the relationship between law and collective memory. This article uses the example of the ICTY archive to explore the relationship between law and memory in post-conflict transition. It argues that this 'legal archive' functions as a mnemonic system that produces 'legal memory' through its juridical, international, and transitional structure. It then considers the competing discourses of how the legal archive remembers or forgets the justice of law and the injustice of war. Ultimately, these discourses figure the archive as a 'legal memorial' that fails to produce collective memory. For this reason, I develop an alternative concept of 'memorial law' in order to suggest other memorial practices that can sustain legal memory as a living memory, rather than as a dead archive.
Protecting victims and punishing perpetrators are now seen as integral elements of the implementation and enforcement of humanitarian norms. However, how international law constructs the victims and perpetrators of international crimes as entities with rights and duties remains insufficiently examined. This paper explores the different models of victims and perpetrators as legal persons in international criminal law. It argues that the legal person takes two forms: the victim of human rights and the perpetrator of criminal responsibility. While the legal regime presents these as autonomous and singular individuals, it also constitutes them as members of groups that criminal norms seek to protect or punish. Contemporary international criminal law resolves this tension between individual and collective rights and responsibilities by reconstituting legal subjectivity through an intersubjective conception of the universal community of humans. Ultimately, this 'legal person' relies on the idea of 'humanity', the collectivity of all humans, to hide this problematic conceptual basis of the rights and duties of victims and perpetrators in ICL.
Jüngste Prozesse der Entwicklung und Implementierung progressiver Modelle von "transitional justice" waren signifikant beeinflusst von Rechtsentwicklungen, die sich auf sexuelle Gewalt in militärischen Konflikten bezogen. Insbesondere der Internationale Strafgerichtshof für das ehemalige Jugoslawien (ICTY) hat bei der Festlegung von Verantwortung für sexuelle Gewalt gegen Frauen in militärischen Konflikten eine Sonderrolle gespielt. Am Beispiel des ICTY wird gezeigt, wie Gender Verantwortungsmechanismen von "transitional justice" strukturieren kann. Gezeigt wird, wie Rechtsnormen und -praktiken bestehende Geschlechterhierarchien eher widerspiegeln und bekräftigen als transformieren. Er behandelt bestehende Modelle sexueller Gewalt als kriminelle Straftat unter internationalem Recht und vergeschlechtlichte Muster rechtlicher Praxis vor dem ICTY. Der Beitrag präsentiert ein neues Modell sexueller Gewalt in Konflikten, schlägt die Entwicklung eines neuen internationalen Straftatbestandes sexuelle Gewalt vor und entwickelt verschiedene Strategien zur internationalen Verfolgung sexueller Gewalt, um die vergeschlechtlichten Muster von "transitional justice" transparent zu machen. (ICEÜbers)
This article explores the relationship between the concepts of trauma and justice in the jurisprudence of crimes against humanity of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, focusing upon cases of sexual violence. It argues that the Tribunal's jurisprudence conceives this crime as a traumatic violation of both the subject of rights and of universal humanity. The Tribunal's models of international justice as procedure, punishment, recognition and therapy understand justice as the legal suturing of this trauma. In these models, the notion of 'justice' functions as phantasy in the psychoanalytic sense of an imaginary scene that veils its impossibility. However, figuring international justice as the resolution of the trauma of crimes against humanity reiterates the traumatic wrong in humanitarian law. Humanitarian law therefore requires a new model of international justice - a model that does not reiterate the past but which can institute the future.