Guest Blogger: Jayne Stoyles

We are delighted to welcome Jayne Stoyles (left) as today's guest blogger.
Jayne is a lawyer, the first Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for International Justice, and an Ashoka Canada Fellow. A decision issued recently in a human rights case in which CCIJ has submitted a friend of the court brief forms the core of her guest post below.
Prior to joining CCIJ, Jayne served for several years as the Program Director of the NGO Coalition for the International Criminal Court in New York, a global network of 2,000 NGOs that helped bring about the establishment of the Court and that was twice nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize during her tenure. She: was also a Senior Adviser to the Institute for Global Policy in New York on issues of human security, UN reform and international justice; provided International Humanitarian Law training for the Red Cross; and taught international law at Carleton University in Canada.
Jayne has spent time in Africa, Latin America, and a First Nations community in northern Canada with a variety of volunteer placements, including working with Centro de Derechos de Mujeres in Honduras on updates to the criminal code from a gender perspective. She is the 2010 winner of the Walter S. Tarnopolsky Human Rights Award and of the Lord Reading Law Society Human Rights Award, was named one of Ottawa’s Top 50 People in 2008 by Ottawa Life Magazine, and has been featured in Canadian legal magazine The Precedent and in the on-line Charity Village Spotlight. She has just accepted a position on the Board of Directors of the International Institute for Criminal Investigations, an international organization of professional investigators, lawyers and academics dedicated to the training and deployment of professionals for the investigation of atrocities. Jayne regularly speaks, writes and provides media interviews about the making of the ICC and international justice issues from a Canadian perspective.
Like Pam Spees, Valerie Oosterveld, and Mary Hansel before her, Jayne would like to dedicate her IntLawGrrls contribution to the beloved Rhonda Copelon.

Heartfelt welcome!

Guest Blogger: Pam Spees

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Pam Spees (left) as a guest blogger. Today she joins IntLawGrrl Valerie Oosterveld to contribute the joint post below from the Review Conference of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which began last week in Kampala, Uganda.
Pam is a senior staff attorney in the international human rights program at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights. She has a background in international criminal and human rights law with a gender focus, as well as criminal trial practice. Prior to joining CCR, she practiced criminal law in Louisiana, where she primarily represented indigent persons in state and federal courts. In addition, she has worked as a consultant in international law with a focus on women's human rights, and previously served as Program Director of the Women's Caucus for Gender Justice, an international advocacy network dedicated to ensuring accountability for crimes of sexual and gender violence included in the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court. Pam now serves as an advisor to the Hague-based Women's Initiatives for Gender Justice, which monitors the Court and continues the Women's Caucus mission of advocating for accountability gender-based violence.
Pam and Valerie dedicate their guest post below to Rhonda Copelon (pictured below right in the post below), who passed away this past May 6. As they write below and as IntLawGrrl Rebecca Bratspies also has posted, Rhonda was a pathbreaking human rights lawyer and law professor. We're honored to recognize her as an IntLawGrrls foremother. Today Rhonda joins the other remarkable women on our list just below the "visiting from..." map at right.
Heartfelt welcome!

Gender and the Kampala ICC conference: Honoring Rhonda Copelon

(Delighted that guest blogger Pam Spees today joins IntLawGrrl Valerie Oosterveld in this contribution, another in IntLawGrrls' series of posts on the Kampala Conference)

KAMPALA, Uganda – The Review Conference of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court has been meeting here for one week now, and one theme that has woven itself throughout the various discussions is that the ICC and States Parties must pay attention to a number of gender issues.
► First, there is widespread agreement that the ICC must continue to prosecute gender-based crimes, such as rape and other forms of sexual violence targeted against women, girls, men, or boys during armed conflict. In official statements and in side-events, the high level of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is often noted.
► Second, during the stocktaking event on the impact on victims and affected communities, panelists and states commented on the Rome Statute's innovation of providing victims with specific status within the ICC’s proceedings.
It is exciting how states, intergovernmental organizations, and nongovernmental organizations are speaking of victim participation as being of crucial importance to the ICC and, moreover, are differentiating the ICC from all that has come before.
The Registrar of the ICC, Silvana Arbia (above left), noted that the ICC has received 2600 applications from individuals to be admitted as victim participants in the ICC process, of which more than 800 have been accepted by the Court. Even so, there is also agreement that the victim participation process is a new one. Accordingly, there have been growing pains in figuring out how best to identify, include, and equip victims for interaction within the ICC, while at the same time staying within the ICC’s budget limitations.
In this context, it is fitting to remember, and honor, Rhonda Copelon (below right), who passed away early in May. (Prior IntLawGrrls post.)
Rhonda was instrumental in founding the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice, which successfully pressed for the inclusion of many gender-sensitive provisions within the Rome Statute. Under the leadership of Rhonda, joined by Alda Facio and Eleanor Conda, the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice grew from a handful of committed feminist activists to over 300 supporters by the time of the 1998 adoption of the Rome Statute.
Here in Kampala, David Donat-Cattin of Parliamentarians for Global Action publicly recalled how Rhonda had helped to take an idea that no state was championing – of giving victims their own legal rights and therefore a legal voice within the ICC’s proceedings – and turn it into a defining characteristic of the ICC process.
Rhonda’s approach in this respect, and that of others in the Women's Caucus, was informed by the concerns about the disempowerment of women serving as victim-witnesses before the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and from the observations and experiences of feminist advocacy within national systems. In this respect, Rhonda’s vision of gender justice was, foremost, that the ICC should first do no harm.
While many international criminal law commentators have recognized the accomplishments of the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice as including, for example, the crime against humanity of rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, and gender-based persecution in the Rome Statute, the Caucus’ focus was in fact much wider. Rhonda’s vision – and the vision of the many women working with her – was that the causes and consequences of armed conflict and mass atrocities are intensely gendered. The Caucus also fiercely advocated for the independence of the ICC, a move questioned by some as not being a 'gender' issue.
Remembering the road from Rome to Kampala is to remember Rhonda Copelon and her untiring dedication to gender justice. There is still a long road ahead and much work to do to ensure gender justice in the ICC and in domestic jurisdictions, but we will continue to travel that road with Rhonda’s example and energy as our guide.