ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how international criminal tribunals have addressed gender-based acts as genocide, and how these tribunals (and international criminal law more generally) could address gender-based acts as genocide in the future. The International Criminal Court has not yet heard a case involving genocide, but its list of the elements of crime for genocide certainly provides the possibility of advancing the prosecution of gender-based acts of genocide beyond that of the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR). The September 1998 Akayesu judgment of the ICTR was the first consideration of individual criminal liability for genocide by an international tribunal and the first such consideration of gender-based genocidal acts. To date, the judgments in Akayesu are the most detailed consideration of the intersection of gender and genocide in the ICTR's jurisprudence. International understanding of the role that gender plays within genocide has advanced significantly since the drafting of the 1948 Genocide Convention.
