The African contribution to the penalization of war crimes of sexual nature

Abstract

Rape and other forms of sexual violence have been inseparably linked with the ongoing military conflicts. Despite the condemnation of war rape in modern times, its penalization arrived extraordinarily slowly. The last twenty years brought about a huge progress in the approach to the penalization of international crimes of sexual nature, which was developed in a hitherto unprecedented range in the jurisprudence of the international criminal tribunals, especially in Africa. The aim of this article is to present the cases of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) which had a significant influence on the penalization of war crimes of sexual nature in the Statute of the International Criminal Court and two trials of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), concerning the penalization of forced marriage. It shows how the African juridical traditions contributed to the problem of the penalization of sexual war crimes.

Keywords

• war crime
• sexual assault
• international criminal tribunal
• Rwanda
• Sierra Leone