Crimes against women in armed conflicts: Judicial activism and feminist legal interpretation as key factors in the reconstruction of concepts of international humanitarian law

Abstract

This chapter examines the novelties in international humanitarian law of the 1990s regarding crimes against women in armed conflicts and argues that they can be explained by two key factors. The first factor is the judicial activism of the ad hoc criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, rather uncommon for the criminal law area. The second factor is the very organized background work of the feminist ‘interpretative community’ against the gender bias in international law. The main conclusion is that although some challenges remain to be addressed, feminist legal discourse has finally started to win the semantic and conceptual ‘war’ against the most serious wording and ontological gaps in international humanitarian law that have existed since the aftermath of World War II, with the creation of the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, and the subsequent Geneva Regime of 1949.