Sexual offences under international criminal law
Abstract
War-time sexual violence (hereinafter: CRSV) appeared in international criminal law in the 1990s with the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Thanks to the case law of these tribunals, acts constituting sexual crimes were included in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The aim of this article is to present the evolution of the criminalisation of sexual violence in international criminal law and to indicate the legal classification of individual acts constituting widely defined sexual violence. The article shows the impact of the case law of ad hoc criminal tribunals on regulations concerning individual responsibility for acts of sexual violence in armed conflicts. The study uses a dogmatic-legal method to analyse existing legal regulations concerning CRSV, as well as reports from non-governmental organisations and doctrinal views. In addition, a comparative legal analysis was conducted to compare the legal regulations of international criminal tribunals. An analysis of the provisions of the ICC Statute and ad hoc criminal tribunals leads to the conclusion that sexual crimes may fulfil the criteria of three of the four international crimes included in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and, depending on the specific facts and intentional actions of the perpetrator, may be considered a crime of genocide, a crime against humanity, or a war crime.
Keywords:
international criminal law, wartime sexual violence, International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, International Criminal Court, rapeReferences
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