Research On The Sexual Violence Against Women In The Armed Conflicts

The history of human civilization is a history of wars. Sexual violence against womenduring armed conflicts is a common phenomenon. With the development of internationalhumanitarian law and human rights law, sexual violence against women during armedconflicts are prohibited by international law and recognized as an international crime.The International Military Tribunal and the International Military Tribunal for the FarEast, established after the Second World War, brought criminal charges against those whobore major responsibility for the atrocities during the war. Some of them were punished,though to a rather limited extent, for committing wartime sexual violence against women. Inthe former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, rape and other forms of sexual violence were widely usedas a weapon of war for the purposes of inflicting horrors and humiliating women from certainethnic groups as well as their whole community. In this context, ad hoc criminal tribunalswere established by the United Nations in the late20thcentury, and a systematic judiciaryregime was developed to prosecute and punish the war criminals in the two regions. From1992and2003, the value of international criminal justice was adopted and absorbed as a basicconstitution of international legal order. The international criminal jurisprudence was not onlyrecognized, but also formally proved by the Security Council. Governments and internationalorganizations regarded this trend as a progressive development of the permanent internationalcriminal judicial system, which is positively represented by the International Criminal Court.Coming into force in2002, the International Criminal Court was reckoned to have the mostdeveloped prosecuting and punishing system to date with regard to sexual violence duringarmed conflicts against women. Verdicts rendered by the International Criminal Tribunal forthe Former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda were fullyexamined and taken into account while drafting the Rome Statute of International CriminalCourt, the Elements of Crimes and the Rules of Procedure and Evidence. The elements andprocedure rules of sexual crimes in particular show influence of the gendered case law of theUN ad hoc criminal tribunals.How the above-mentioned international criminal judiciary bodies interpret the statutesand related international legal instruments, how they promote the development ofinternational criminal law by means of typical court jurisprudence, what difficulties andsetbacks has the International Criminal Court confronted with, and how to overcome these bottlenecks, are the main topics discussed in this article.The main body of this article is divided into four parts. Part I analyses the phenomenonof sexual violence against women in armed conflicts and its causes and negativeconsequences. It also reviews, from a historical perspective, the increasing protection ofwomen in armed conflicts by international law. Part II outlines the construction of prosecutingand punishing systems against wartime sexual violence against women, including theestablishment of emblematic international criminal judiciary bodies, development of criminalcharges against sexual violence against women in armed conflicts, and the procedural rulesspecially used in the trial of wartime sexual violence against women. Part III reviews thejudicial practices of the prosecution and punishment of sexual violence against women inarmed conflicts, including symbolic verdicts from the UN ad hoc criminal tribunals and theInternational Criminal Court. Part IV summarizes, based on the analysis of the citedjudgments in Part III, the judicial dilemmas in prosecuting sexual violence against women inarmed conflicts by the International Criminal Court, and provides a number of improvementmechanisms accordingly.