Gender, Persecution, and the International Criminal Court: Refugee Law's Relevance to the Crime against Humanity of Gender-Based Persecution
![handle is hein.journals/djcil17 and id is 53 raw text is: GENDER, PERSECUTION, AND THE
INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT:
REFUGEE LAW'S RELEVANCE TO THE CRIME
AGAINST HUMANITY OF GENDER-BASED
PERSECUTION
VALERIE OOSTERVELD*
INTRODUCTION
The crime against humanity of gender-based persecution was
first codified in the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal
Court.' The recognition of this specific form of persecution has been
hailed as a significant advance in the field of international criminal
law.2 The crime against humanity of racially-, politically-, or
religiously-based persecution has been explored by international
tribunals and academic commentators, but the newly identified
gender-based persecution has not been analyzed in the same depth.
While cases and commentary on the more established grounds can
and will assist the International Criminal Court (ICC) in examining
gender-based persecution, especially with respect to the intersection
of gender with race, political opinion, and religion, the ICC should
also look outside of international criminal law for guidance.
Copyright © 2006 by Valerie Oosterveld.
* Assistant Professor, University of Western Ontario Faculty of Law. This article was
written in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of the Science of Law
in the Faculty of Law, Columbia University. The author would like to thank the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its doctoral fellowship, Melodie Hughes and
Kathleen Burke for their research assistance, and Sharryn Aiken, Lori Damrosch, and Melanie
Randall for their comments on earlier drafts. All errors are the author's own.
1. Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court art. 7(1)(h), July 17, 1998, 2187
U.N.T.S. 90, 37 I.L.M. 999, 1004 (1998) [hereinafter Rome Statute].
2. E.g., Barbara Bedont, Gender-Specific Provisions in the Statute of the International
Criminal Court, in ESSAYS ON THE ROME STATUTE OF THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL
COURT 183, 201 (Flavia Lattanzi & William A. Schabas eds., 1999); Cate Steains, Gender Issues,
in THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT: THE MAKING OF THE ROME STATUTE: ISSUES,
NEGOTIATIONS, RESULTS 357, 371 (Roy S. Lee ed., 1999); Rhonda Copelon, Gender Crimes as
War Crimes: Integrating Crimes Against Women into International Criminal Law, 46 MCGILL
L.J. 217, 237 (2000).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/djcil17&div=6&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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