Survivors of Sexual Violence and the African Union: A Model to Follow?

(Delighted to welcome back alumna Doris Buss, who contributes this guest post)

Women’s civil society groups from across Africa met recently with state ambassadors in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as part of a now-annual meeting of the Peace and Security Council of the African Union with civil society.
The March 28 meeting included addresses by the various ‘office holders’ below: Margot Wallström (middle), the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Litha Musyimi-Ogana (left), the Director of the Women, Gender and Development Directorate of the African Union, and Dr. Mary Chinery-Hesse (right), from the AU’s Panel of the Wise.
But the real force of the meetings came from the “Survivors of Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict”, who had traveled from Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Uganda and Zimbabwe. The meeting included time for “first-hand accounts” from the survivors, as well as discussion of different models of civil society initiatives for rehabilitation and community reintegration.
At the end of the event the survivors of sexual violence released a Statement, which is a moving testament to the urgent health needs of sexual violence sufferers in Africa. The Statement makes a number of recommendations relating to health care, including, a call for “comprehensive medical care, including emergency surgery services, and trained medical workers on trauma management” and a recommendation that AU member states “ increase their health budget for our sexual and reproductive health complications and trauma management”.
The frustration of civil society actors in ‘post’ conflict negotiations is also clearly evident in the Statement:

We are deeply saddened by the fact that our violators and their apologists are often seated on these tables deciding our fate. We are therefore not surprised that post conflict processes do not include the concerns and priorities of survivors of sexual violence. Instead, we are often urged to let bygones be bygones and look to the future. We cannot look to the future when we are hurting physically and psychologically, and are unable to pick up the pieces of our lives.

Among the recommendations made is a call for the AU to “adopt sexual violence as a disqualifying criterion for leadership” in line with UN Security Council Resolution 1960.
As an example of civil society and state interactions, this annual meeting between the AU and victims of sexual violence may be a model to consider in other contexts. I wonder, for example, what would happen if members of the Canadian Parliament (or US House of Representatives), agreed to meet each year with a representative group of poor single mothers to hear about their lives and experiences over the past year?

Rape Claimant and the Veil: A Case for the Supreme Court of Canada

(Delighted to welcome back alumna Doris Buss, who contributes this guest post)

The Supreme Court of Canada recently agreed to hear the appeal in a case involving a niqab-wearing woman who is the sexual assault claimant in a criminal case against two male defendants.
N.S., the claimant, wears a niqab, a veil covering the face but not eyes. Now an adult, N.S. claims the two defendants, one a family member, the other a family friend, sexual assaulted her as a child. At the preliminary inquiry, the defendants insisted the claimant remove her niqab while testifying so they could assess her demeanor as part of their defence.
The preliminary inquiry judge agreed, and ordered N.S. to remove her niqab while testifying. She refused and the matter was brought to the Ontario Court of Appeal, which overruled the preliminary trial order that she remove her niqab, but sent the matter back to the preliminary judge for a reconsideration. N.S. requested and has now been granted leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The case of N.S. is generally depicted as pitting freedom of religion against the rights of defendants in criminal trials. At least one of the interveners – Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund – has argued otherwise. LEAF, which intervened at the Ontario Court of Appeal and will likely apply to intervene at the Supreme Court, has argued this case raises issues about access to justice for religiously observant women, and should be seen in the context of tactics that revictimize sexual assault complainants. Ordering a woman to remove her veil, LEAF suggests, is an attempt to “humiliate and intimidate” and “diminish and beat down” the complainant at trial.

The Creation of International Law

Greetings from Oslo, where a number of IntLawGrrls (members, guests, and alumnae) are participating in a conference organized by Cecilia Bailliet and others at the University of Oslo Faculty of Law on The Creation of International Law: An Exploration of Normative Innovation, Contextual Application, and Interpretation in a Time of Flux.

Participants include the following women in international law (IntLawGrrls have a * next to their names):

► Henriette Aasen - University of Bergen
► Montserrat Abad - Carlos III University of Madrid
► Sumudu Atapattu (above left) - University of Wisconsin
► * Karima Bennoune (left) Rutgers School of Law, Newark
► * Rebecca M. Bratspies (right, in black) - CUNY School of Law
► Catherine Brölmann (below, in blue) - University of Amsterdam


►* Doris Buss - Carleton University
► Rosemary Byrne (right, with scarf) - Trinity College Dublin
► Christine Byron - Cardiff Law School (below left, in purple)
►* Hilary Charlesworth (below, in white) - Australian National University

► *Fiona de Londras (below) - University College Dublin
► Katherine Del Mar (below right) - University of Geneva
► Malgosia Fitzmaurice - Queen Mary University of London School of Law
► Anne Hellum - University of Oslo
► Agnieszka Jachec-Neale (below right, in front of window) - School of Oriental and Asian Studies
► Edda Kristjansdottir - Amsterdam Law School
► Catharine MacKinnon - Harvard Law School/U. Michigan Law School
► Claudia Martin - AU Washington College of Law
► *Fionnuala Ni Aoláin - U. Minnesota School of Law
► Phoebe Okawa (right) - Queen Mary University School of Law
► *Hari M. Osofsky - U. Minnesota School of Law
► Inger Johanne Sand - University of Oslo
► Kirsten Sandberg (right, in green) - University of Oslo
► Birgit Schlütter - Norwegian Center for Human Rights
► Hitomi Takemura - NUI Galway & Kyusha International University
► * Beth Van Schaack - Santa Clara University School of Law
► Maria Varaki - PhD candidate, NUI Galway; Irish Centre for Human Rights

Stay tuned for additional postings from the conference.

Write On! Sexual violence/conflict in Africa

(IntLawGrrls welcomes back alumna Doris Buss, who contributes this Write On! guest post regarding a call for papers for an upcoming conference she's organizing)

"Sexual Violence and Conflict in Africa" is the subject of a 2-day workshop to be held May 5 & 6, 2010, at my home institution, Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.
At this event, which is supported by the United Nations University, we plan to bring together academics and activists to initiate a detailed, multi-disciplinary, and multi-sectoral discussion of sexual violence and conflict in Africa. The workshop will be a mix of paper presentations and roundtable discussions to explore the social, political, economic, and cultural aspects of sexual violence and conflict in Africa. The intent is to move beyond descriptions of the phenomenon to a discussion of causes, consequences, patterns and possible solutions.
Paper proposals and applications for participation are invited from academics, practitioners (including non-governmental organisations) and service-providers. To foster a high-level, focused discussion, space is limited, and not all papers and participants can be accommodated.
To apply, please send in a paper proposal setting out the title, an abstract of fewer than 200 words, and a brief explanation of where your paper/research/area of expertise fits with the following workshop themes:
► 1. Understanding Wartime Sexual Violence: What is known about the patterns and processes of sexual violence in difference conflict zones in Africa? To what extent can and should comparisons be made across (or even within) conflict settings? What research is being done/data gathered and by whom? What work is being done on developing and reflecting on research methodologies and analytical frameworks for examining wartime sexual violence?
► 2. Sexual Violence and Ethnic/National conflict: What is the relationship between conflict, forms of conflict, identity markers, and patterns of sexualized violence. How have gender and ethnicity been invoked, contested and redefined through wartime rape? How do pre-conflict customs and norms explain the potential for, or resistance to wartime sexual violence? How is ethnicity and race understood and deployed by conflict actors, and the international community seeking to intervene in (or after) conflict? How do ethnic and gender categories function in a post conflict context to shape access to social resources by victims of sexual violence?
► 3. Militarism, masculinity and small arms: How are norms of masculinity invoked or changed through different types of militarism? What role do small arms, or changing patterns of armed conflict, play in structuring certain types of masculinity? How, in turn, does this impact on the conditions for and patterns of sexual violence? How are African masculinities portrayed in Western conceptions of and responses to wartime sexual violence?
► 4. The political economy of sexual violence: This panel explores the complex link between political economy, environment and wartime sexual violence. What role do multinational corporations, foreign direct investment, aid, and resource extraction play in creating the conditions for, and international responses to, wartime sexual violence?
► 5. Peacekeeping and Peacemaking: the role of the international community: What impact and influence do UN initiatives, including peacekeeping efforts have on the patterns and processes of sexual violence in conflict settings? What impact do they have on efforts to redress particular forms of sexual violence? What role do international actors play in the continuities between exploitation in war and peace?
► 6. (Re)presenting rape: What are the circumstances within which wartime rape in Africa becomes visible in and to the West? What political and analytical ‘work’ does the African rape victim, and the African rapists do in Western narratives of action, inaction, politics and justice? How and in what ways is the colonial project in Africa visible, or not, in Western representations of African sexual violence? How do such colonial tropes motivate international and Western responses and, for better or for worse, help constitute the transnational social field through which African activists operate?
► 7. Postconflict and transition: How do patterns and processes of sexual violence become visible, or not, in post conflict transition and reconciliation efforts? To what extent do patterns of sexual violence impact upon access to resources and redress in postconflict contexts? How are masculinities contested and redefined in the conflict period and to what extent does that impact on efforts to address (redress) wartime sexual violence?
If you are interested in simply participating, please send a brief letter identifying yourself, your organisation, and the nature of your work/interests in relation to the themes below.
Please send all correspondence to: sexualviolence.conflict.africa@gmail.com. Deadline for proposals is March 2, 2010.

Clinton chairs Security Council Wednesday

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is slated to chair Wednesday's session of the U.N. Security Council.
Clinton (left) is due to return to the Council's headquarters (prior post) and gavel the session to order at 10 a.m. Eastern time tomorrow, September 30. (photo credit)
The subject is "Women, Peace, and Security," and the Council is expected to vote on a U.S.-sponsored resolution concerning sexual violence in armed conflict. The new resolution will follow up on S.C. Res. 1820 (2008), on which IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Doris Buss posted recently. Resolution 1820 is itself a followup to S.C. Res. 1325 (2000).
Check for live webcast here.

Guest Blogger: Doris Buss

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Doris Buss (right) as today's guest blogger.
An Associate Professor in the Department of Law at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, Doris is an expert in the use of international criminal adjudication to prosecute persons suspected of international crimes. She teaches courses in international law and governance, on matters such as human rights and international criminal law. Doris' scholarship draws on feminist and postcolonial theories to ask inter alia:

Could it be that international criminal law, rather than promoting a stronger respect for human rights, instead echoes and repeats colonial forms of governance?

With regard to prosecution of wartime sexual violence, moreover, she asks:

Might it be the case that in making wartime sexual violence against women an issue of hyper-visibility, international criminal law and human rights are erasing and displacing other forms of violence and inequality?

Doris examines the categorization of rape as a weapon of war in her guest post below.
In addition to her scholarly activities, Doris serves on the Board of the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (prior post), chairing its Law Program Committee. She earned an B.A. from Carleton, an LL.B. from Dalhousie University, and an LL.M. from the University of British Columbia.
She dedicates her post to the memory of Eleanor Rathbone (below left), who served as an Independent Member of the British Parliament from 1929 until her sudden death in 1946. (photo credit) Born in Liverpool in 1872, Rathbone was a social reformer, proponent of women’s rights, advocate of family allowance, and the author of The disinherited family: A plea for direct provision for the costs of child maintenance through family allowances (2004).
Doris writes that she learned of Rathbone only recently, when her friend and colleague, Didi Herman, Professor of Law and Social Change at the University of Kent, mentioned Rathbone "in the context of a brief exchange about feminist mothers whose social justice politics too often failed to include racialized and other socially disenfranchised groups. Rathbone," Doris continues, "stands as an example of someone whose political convictions embraced women’s rights, socialist principles, a more just society, and a responsibility to all individuals, citizenship and membership notwithstanding." She concludes: "The truly exceptional politics and life contribution of Eleanor Rathbone is perhaps best teased out in the first three lines of Susan Pedersen’s brilliant book, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (2004)":

Whatever Eleanor Rathbone’s constituents thought their Member of Parliament should be doing in early March of 1939, it probably wasn’t what she was doing – which was hiring a ship to run the blockade of Spain and bring Republicans threatened with reprisal to safety. Of course, she was doing other things as well – putting together a plan to expand schoolchildren’s access to free milk and meals, for example, and reviving her campaign for family allowances, which were beginning to look achievable as the prospect of war put the health of the population back on the political agenda. But in early 1939, with Franco’s troops poised for final victory in Spain, Czech Jews and social democrats fleeing the territories ceded to the Nazis by the Munich accords and Hitler poised for another eastward strike, international issues and the claims of refugees must take priority.

Today Rathbone joins IntLawGrrls other transnational foremothers in the list below our "visiting from ..." map at right.
Heartfelt welcome!

On "rape as a weapon of war"

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this guest post)

U.N. Security Council Resolution 1820, entitled “Women and peace and security” and adopted on June 19, 2008, can be seen as the culmination of a long effort to have sexual violence against women recognized as instrumental – rather than incidental – to war.

In its very 1st paragraph, Resolution 1820 noted what feminists had been explaining for many years, that rape when enacted as a “tactic” of war “can significantly exacerbate situations of armed conflict and may impede the restoration of international law.” Rape can be a weapon of war, an instrumental part of conflict. As a result it must be addressed as a serious crime and an impediment to peace.

It is this recognition of rape as a ‘weapon of war’ that interests me, and which I explore it in “Rethinking Rape as a Weapon of War”, soon to be published in, and available in full online at, the journal Feminist Legal Studies. Feminist legal academics and activists writing in the early-mid 1990s, argued for recognizing ‘rape as a weapon of war’ as a means to articulate the systematic, pervasive, and orchestrated nature of wartime sexual violence that marked it as integral rather than incidental to war. In this usage, rape as a weapon of war is seen as resulting from and produced through political, social and military contexts.

The recognition of ‘rape as a weapon of war’ appears to have been taken up in numerous legal and policy institutions, from the Security Council (above right) to the war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. But what happens to the meaning of ‘rape as a weapon of war’ in these legal settings?

In my review of the jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (up to December 2008), I found that the Chamber’s depiction of rape as an instrument of the genocide constrained both the types of sexual violence and the categories of victims that it was able to see. More profoundly, in the Tribunal’s usage, rape understood as a weapon of war positioned rape as an inevitable – almost ‘natural’ – part of conflicts seen as ‘ethnic’ or ‘nationalist’. Rape became, in effect, an instrument that ‘one side’ picks up and uses against the ‘other side.’

This approach, I argue, assumes that rape is simply always available as a weapon. In this maneuvre, moreover, the Tribunal’s characterization of rape as an instrument of the genocide has the effect opposite to what feminists intended. Considering rape ‘as an instrument of the genocide’ makes it difficult to ask critical questions; for instance: why the rapes happened; how the rapes might have been connected to various social relations and structures that predated the genocide; and what women did to negotiate and resist sexual violence.

Go On! "Reforming Laws on Sexual Violence"

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia of interest.) In October 2000 the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, however the questions surrounding sexual violence and how the law ought to respond in order to both prevent and punish sexual violence continues to be contentious in both the international and domestic legal systems.

On 27 June 2008 the Centre for Criminal Justice and Human Rights, University College Cork (Ireland) will hold a conference entitled "Reforming Laws on Sexual Violence: International Perspectives," at which international and domestic experts will consider questions and issues relating to legal responses to sexual violence. The papers presented will consider the treatment of sexual violence in ad hoc tribunals, sexual violence and peacekeeping, transitional justice and responses to sexual violence, and the reform of the Irish criminal legal system in this relation.

This one-day conference is supported by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and forms part of Ireland’s chair of the Human Security Network. Full conference details, including booking form, are available here. Conference speakers include:

► Judge Teresa Doherty (Special Court for Sierra Leone)
► Kelly D. Askin (Open Society Initiative, and an IntLawGrrl)
► Prof. Doris Buss, Carleton University, Canada
► Amira Khair Khair, ICC Women/Sudan
► Madeleine Rees, Head of Women’s Rights and Gender Unit, Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
► Col. Ben Klappe, Military Judge/Judge in the District Court Arnheim/Netherlands Defence Academy
► Lt. Col. Oliver Barbour, Irish Defence Forces (GBV Consortium)
► Prof. Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, University of Minnesota/Transitional Justice Institute, University of Ulster
► Prof. Penny Andrews, Valparaiso University (USA)/La Trobe University (Australia)
► Dr. Milena Pires, Timor-Leste

► James Hamilton, Director of Public Prosecutions
► Dr. Tom O’Malley BL, National University of Ireland, Galway
► Pauline Walley, Senior Counsel

Details on registration here.