Sex and International Tribunals. Chiseche Salome Mibenge
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(art. 2). General Comment 25 also calls for accountability for abusers and makes an unprecedented demand by a treaty body for the establishment of an international tribunal to prosecute genocide and crimes against humanity, including murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, rape, and other inhumane acts directed against any civilian population on political, racial, and religious grounds. Not surprisingly, CERD’s comment was made following the Security Council Resolution establishing the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.36
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights defines “special procedures” as those mechanisms the Commission on Human Rights established to address either specific country situations or thematic issues.37 Although they may be constituted in any manner, special procedures are commonly either an individual, called a special rapporteur or representative or an independent expert, or a group of individuals, called a working group.38
These experts, whether individually or as a group, examine, monitor, advise, and publicly report on human rights situations in specific countries or territories, known as country mandates, or on major phenomena of human rights violations worldwide, known as thematic mandates. Experts can conduct studies, provide advice on technical cooperation, respond to individual complaints, and engage in general promotional activities. Thematic subjects taken up by experts have included investigations into trafficking in persons, child prostitution and child pornography, the human rights of internally displaced persons, and violence against women. These experts’ reports include much needed interpretations of human rights instruments, and many include gender analyses that take into account the different ways girls, boys, men, and women experience human rights abuses on a day-to-day basis, including in armed conflict.
The work of the special rapporteurs and other human rights experts has added texture and depth to the international community’s understanding of gender-based violence and its victims. Their elaboration on the shape and impact of gender-based violence is possible through country visits that allow a contextual analysis of harms, and often a critique of the failure to prevent and punish abuses through the implementation of the existing legal framework. The Special Rapporteur on violence against women provides far reaching analyses of violence against women in armed conflict. This body of work provides an unprecedented portrait of sexual violence as a weapon of war. Evidence collected from country visits she conducted under her mandate, particularly to Rwanda and Sierra Leone lays the groundwork to my discussion on justice, gender, and violence in these countries in Chapters 2, 3, and 4.
Following a country visit to Rwanda after the 1994 genocide, the rapporteur substantiated existing definitions of sexual violence with the testimonies of Rwandan women describing their personal experiences of genocide. Forced nudity appeared as a recurring theme in many of these testimonies. In one case, women were forced to strip naked as they dug graves and buried the corpses of their husbands (Special Rapporteur 1998: para. 78). In another case, a woman was forced to strip naked and walk for thirty kilometers; she told the rapporteur of the humiliation she continued to feel when she encountered people who had witnessed her nudity during the genocide (ibid., para. 34). The rapporteur referred to these experiences as not simply humiliation but as sexual humiliation that has resulted in mental health disturbances. The country visit allowed the rapporteur to write the continuum of harm into the narrative of gender-based violence, emphasizing the individual harm women experience as well as the aggravating nature of women’s perceived sense of rejection and censorious judgment by their communities. Further, because of her physical presence in Rwanda, she was able to discern the violent and sexual nature of forced nudity and its cultural context from the victim’s perspective. The rapporteur’s report also provides insight into existing structural inequalities in Rwanda before the genocide, such as women’s lack of access to land rights and poorly developed reproductive health care.
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