Search

The jurisdiction of the African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples' Rights (ACJHPR) will include international crimes of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). This article explores the challenges the Court is likely to face in building regional and national accountability for CRSV, by considering the lessons that might be learnt from the experiences of the former Yugoslavia in prosecuting these crimes. The article focuses on the two key challenges of developing 'best practice' within regional and national courts, and of linking these prosecutions to peace processes and post-conflict reconstruction. To address these challenges, the article argues for a 'gender justice framework' of guiding principles to ensure effective and equitable CRSV prosecutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protecting victims and punishing perpetrators are now seen as integral elements of the implementation and enforcement of humanitarian norms. However, how international law constructs the victims and perpetrators of international crimes as entities with rights and duties remains insufficiently examined. This paper explores the different models of victims and perpetrators as legal persons in international criminal law. It argues that the legal person takes two forms: the victim of human rights and the perpetrator of criminal responsibility. While the legal regime presents these as autonomous and singular individuals, it also constitutes them as members of groups that criminal norms seek to protect or punish. Contemporary international criminal law resolves this tension between individual and collective rights and responsibilities by reconstituting legal subjectivity through an intersubjective conception of the universal community of humans. Ultimately, this 'legal person' relies on the idea of 'humanity', the collectivity of all humans, to hide this problematic conceptual basis of the rights and duties of victims and perpetrators in ICL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between the concepts of trauma and justice in the jurisprudence of crimes against humanity of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, focusing upon cases of sexual violence. It argues that the Tribunal's jurisprudence conceives this crime as a traumatic violation of both the subject of rights and of universal humanity. The Tribunal's models of international justice as procedure, punishment, recognition and therapy understand justice as the legal suturing of this trauma. In these models, the notion of 'justice' functions as phantasy in the psychoanalytic sense of an imaginary scene that veils its impossibility. However, figuring international justice as the resolution of the trauma of crimes against humanity reiterates the traumatic wrong in humanitarian law. Humanitarian law therefore requires a new model of international justice — a model that does not reiterate the past but which can institute the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]