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10 Gonz. J. Int'l L. 43 (2006-2007)
Gender Crimes and the International Criminal Tribunals

handle is hein.journals/gjil10 and id is 43 raw text is: GENDER CRIMES AND THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL TRIBUNALS Sita Balthazar * When I arrived at the International Criminal Court for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania in 1999, the Tribunal was on a mission to bring to light the sexual violence that had taken place during the genocide. I barely had had time to walk through the building's metal detectors and already, unbeknownst to me, I had been drafted into the mission. My desk was piled with files filled with hundreds of pages of testimony by Rwandan women. Before starting my work with Judge William Sekule at the Tribunal, I had spent a couple of months working with sexual violence survivors in Rwanda. I had visited mass graves, seen female bodies with legs spread apart and talked to countless rape survivors, many of whom were HIV positive and were living in U.N.-built camps in Rwanda. I had no trouble putting faces to the anonymous testimony at the Tribunal; testimony which was only labeled as Witness A, Witness E, Witness F. So it has been over six years since my work at the Tribunal and it has been sixty years since Nuremberg. From Nuremberg to Rwanda, what has changed? Quite a bit. The last decade has witnessed a profound transformation in the treatment of sexual violence in international law. Evidence of the widespread use of rape as a policy tool in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda has led to the legal reconceptualization of sexual violence and conflict. Both ad hoc tribunals, one for the former Yugoslavia, or ICTY, the other for Rwanda, or ICTR, broke new ground. They tackled the complexities of rape, enslavement, torture, and genocide. They struggled with determining a legal definition of rape. They wrestled with balancing the rights of the defendant and the rights of the witness. Although both the ICTY and the ICTR made a number of landmark decisions with regard to gender crimes, I will focus my remarks on the ICTR. * Amnesty International USA, Legal Network. Ms. Balthazar taught International Law at Al- Quds University in the Palestinian Territories. She served as a delegate at the negotiations for the International Criminal Court and drafted decisions for the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The opinions in this article are those of the author alone.

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