CRIMES AGAINST PERSONS

Crimes against Persons

Crimes against Persons

Introduction

The 1949 Geneva Convention specifically prohibits offenses against "women's honor." However, Article 147 of that agreement does not list rape and sexual violence as a "grave breach" of customary international law, which explicitly incorporate penal sanctions. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), created in 1993, marked a turning point in international law by producing a number of significant decisions where rape and sexual violence were prosecuted as crimes against people and as war crimes

Overview

Over the course of the 1990s, the intemational community saw significant development and utilization of legal frameworks for mechanisms designed to prevent crimes against people and genocide. These mechanisms were used in over a dozen conflicts and allowed the intemational community to intervene to halt atrocities, punish those responsible for atrocities, provide redress for victims, and work together to prevent such crimes in the future. Utilized together, these mechanisms have the potential to be powerful tools against the perpetration of crimes against people and genocide. Humanitarian intervention is a particularly crucial piece in this emerging mosaic of measures designed to prevent crimes against people and genocide. Since the early 1990s, there has been a significant need for humanitarian intervention, a need that will likely continue well into the future. For a time, there was also a significant reliance on humanitarian intervention to address many of the worst intrastate and interstate confiicts. Unfortunately, despite the importance of humanitarian intervention, the intemational community is less likely to undertake meaningful and effective humanitarian interventions in the coming years.

Future use of humanitarian intervention is limited by both the failure to develop an adequate legal basis for the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, and by a number of geo-political factors that mitigate against any significant humanitarian interventions in the near future. As such, the intemational community has lost one of its key tools to prevent crimes against people and genocide, thereby weakening its overall ability to address such atrocities. The brief gained much international attention. Taking into account NGO and UN reports, as well as witness testimony in cases involving charges of rape, the authors of the brief documented the overwhelming occurrence of rape in Rwanda and showed that rape could be prosecuted as a crime against people, torture, cruel treatment, outrage upon personal dignity, and genocide under Articles 2, 3(g), 3(f), 4, and 4(e) in the ICTR Statute. To justify this claim, they ...