ABSTRACT
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), established by the Security Council acting under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations, were the first international criminal tribunals since the Nuremberg Tribunal and International Military Tribunal for the Far East established at the end of World War II. Security Council Resolutions 1503 (2003) and 1534 (2004) provide that the tribunals are to complete their proceedings by the end of 2010. These tribunals ushered in a phase in international criminal law in which ad hoc judicialized institutions are increasingly viable options for postconflict societies. We now have ad hoc tribunals, both hybrid and completely international, for Cambodia, Sierra Leone, Lebanon, and Timor Leste as well as the permanent International Criminal Court (ICC). The age of international criminal accountability has arrived. But to what extent are these tribunals making individuals accountable for the widespread sexual violence that often occurs in times of armed conflict and genocide? This chapter considers that question in the context of the ICTY and the ICTR and assesses the extent to which the tribunals are providing justice for female victims of sexual violence. The chapter focuses on the many doctrinal advances made by the tribunals
and the less impressive operationalization of those advances. This commitment, to examine positive law and law in practice and critically appraise the dissonances that appear, is an important part of feminist legal methodology. The following analysis reveals that many difficulties relating to the prosecution of sexual violence before these tribunals are familiar to feminist legal theorists who have faced similar difficulties in domestic criminal justice systems. These difficulties lead to questions about the transfer of norms between the domestic and the international: to what extent are feminist lessons learned domestically transferred to the international sphere? What kinds of lessons about prosecuting sexual violence will transfer from international proceedings to the reconstituted justice systems in post-conflict jurisdictions?
