International Courts Association Rape and international criminal law
Gedrukt boek
Only recently the international community has recognized the seriousness of rape as well as its nature of international crime punishable by international criminal tribunals. During the Balkan conflict in the last decade of XX century, the atrocities committed have awakened the conscience of those who, until then, had preferred to consider rape as a side effect of wars, both international and internal. The finding of camps where rape was conducted in a systematic way, for the mere solace of armed forces, and the use of rape as a tool of genocide (the infamous "ethnic cleansing") have led to the creation of the first true international criminal tribunal (the ICTY) as well as to the inclusion, for the first time, of the crime of "rape" within the ratione materiae jurisdiction of international judges. Through the jurisprudence of the ICTY and of its twin tribunal (the ICTR, for Rwanda), the notion of rape and its different shades have been gradually outlined, and finally incorporated almost entirely by the Statute of the International Criminal Court