ABSTRACT
This chapter explores that debate and future challenges for the field, including the development of gender crimes as jus cogens norms of customary international law. It details how sexual violence was used in Bosnia, and a year later in Rwanda, as a tool of genocide, and how the horror of those genocides transformed gender crimes from "the least condemned war crime[s]"to an emerging area of international criminal law. The Bosnian and Rwandan conflicts were unique in their use of rape as a tool of genocide, a fact that was reflected in the prominence of gender crimes in the statutes of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The issue of gender crimes has again resurfaced in some of the first cases referred to the Rome Statute of International Criminal Court from the Democratic People's Republic of Congo, which will provide the court with a chance to continue to define the contours of the law.
