Chapter

Criminalizing rape and sexual violence as methods of warfare

Ludovica Poli

War crimes and the conduct of hostilities : challenges to adjudication and investigation

Cheltenham ; Northampton : E. Elgar, 2013

p. 136-152

English

Poli examines the criminalization of rape and sexual violence in International Humanitarian Law (IHL). She traces the evolution of IHL’s understanding of rape from being a private act to the recognition of sex crimes as strategies of war by the International minal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and for Rwanda (ICTR). She notes other positive changes in the law such as the use of gender-neutral language and the change from defining rape as a crime against honor to a crime of violence. Although rape had long been outlawed, Poli explains that courts rarely enforced those laws, pointing to the International Military Tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo as examples of unsatisfactory prosecution of rape as a war crime. The author explores the contributions of the ICTY, ICTR, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), noting the criminalization of rape and the identification of sexual slavery and forced marriage as violations of laws of war. She also argues that the inclusion of an explicit list of sexual war crimes in the Statute of the International Criminal Court further increased protection against the use of sexual violence in armed conflict. Despite this progress, Poli argues that the definition of rape and the nature of consent still require further clarification. [Summary by students at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law (IHRP)]

• War crimes and the conduct of hostilities : challenges to adjudication and investigation / ed. by Fausto Pocar, Marco Pedrazzi, Micaela Frulli