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18 Harv. Hum Rts. J. 85 (2005)
Making the Invisible War Crime Visible: Post-Conflict Justice for Sierra Leone's Rape Victims

handle is hein.journals/hhrj18 and id is 91 raw text is: Making the Invisible War Crime Visible: Post-Conflict Justice for Sierra Leone's Rape Victims Binaifer Nowrojee* When the civil war in Sierra Leone came to an end in 2002, the interna- tional community created two transitional justice mechanisms to address past atrocities: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the Spe- cial Court for Sierra Leone. Little attention has been paid in the interna- tional community or in the scholarly literature to the efforts made by these institutions to address and redress the wartime sexual violence routinely directed at women and girls. The two institutions in Sierra Leone are note- worthy for seriously undertaking to fulfill their mandate to address crimes against women and for using gender-sensitive strategies to ensure the com- fort, safety, and dignity of the rape victims coming forward to testify. While this should be standard operating practice for international institutions, the practices of the ad hoc international criminal tribunals and other transitional justice mechanisms illustrate the unfortunate fact that gender justice often re- mains the exception rather than the rule in post-conflict societies. Addition- ally, Sierra Leone represents one of the only places in which the international community has set up both a truth commission and a court in a post-conflict setting; utilizing both institutions concurrently has already produced both posi- tive and negative effects for Sierra Leone, raising crucial questions and set- ting important precedents for future conflict resolution scenarios. Although the ultimate success of these two international justice mecha- nisms in the particular arena of gender justice in Sierra Leone remains to be seen, the steps taken so far are encouraging. Together, they can provide a best practices model for other international justice mechanisms, including the International Criminal Court. Sexual violence has been an in-isible war crime in * Counsel, Human Rights Watch Africa; Lecturer, Harvard Law School. As a Human Rights Watch researcher for the past ten years, the author has interviewed hundreds of rape victims from a number of conflict areas in Africa including Burundi, Liberia, Rwanda, and Somalia. In Sierra Leone she served as a facilitator in the gender training conducted for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) com- missioners and their staff by the U.N. Fund for Women (UNIFEM), assisted national women's groups with their written submissions before the TRC, and testified at the TRC hearings as a representative of the Coalition on Women's Human Rights in Conflict. She has also testified as an expert witness on sexual violence before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). The author would like to thank her colleagues and friends in the Coalition on Women's Human Rights in Conflict Situations as well as Harvard Law School students Zinaida Miller, Jennifer House, and Naomi Loewith.

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