Ending Impunity for Gender Crimes under the International Criminal Court
![handle is hein.journals/brownjwa6 and id is 81 raw text is: Ending Impunity for
Gender Crimes under the
International Criminal Court
BARBAmA BEDoNT AND KATHERINE HAiL-MARTINEZ
Assistant Coordinator, Democracy and Justice Program, International
Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development;
Deputy Director, International Program Center for
Reproductive Law and Policy
[T]hey brought her fourteen-year-old son and forced him to rape her .... On
[another] occasion, I was raped with a gun by one of the three men... in the
room.... Others stood watching. Some spat on us. They were raping me, the
mother and her daughter at the same time. Sometimes you had to accept ten
men, sometimes three.... I felt I wanted to die .... The Serbs said to us, Why
aren't you pregnant?.... I think they wanted to know who was pregnant in
case anyone was hiding it. They wanted women to have children to stigmatize
us forever. The child is a reminder of what happened.'
-Anonymous, Bosnia
or millennia, women and girls have suffered rape, sexual slavery, forced
pregnancy, and other brutal forms of sexual and gender violence during
armed conflict. Like other forms of war-related brutality, such violence is
often sanctioned, tolerated, or ordered by military, paramilitary, or other govern-
mental actors. Although the international community has made some strides in
outlawing and punishing atrocities committed during armed conflict through
the development of international humanitarian law, gender-based violence has
been consistently marginalized or dismissed as a natural consequence of war.
The international community's conclusion of a treaty in July 1998 to
create a permanent International Criminal Court (the ICC or the Court) to in-
vestigate and punish genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in cir-
cumstances in which national authorities fail to do so was indeed an important
Winter/Spring 1999 - Volume V, Issue 1](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/brownjwa6&div=13&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Ending Impunity for Gender Crimes under the International Criminal Court
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