Doris Buss

Prosecuting Mass Rape: Prosecutor v. Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovac and Zoran Vukovic

The Yugoslav war crimes tribunal convictedthree men for their role in the mass rape ofMuslim women during the conflict inBosnia-Hercegovina. That decision is a landmarkin many respects, but primarily for itsdetermination that the rape of Muslim womenamounted to a crime against humanity. Thiscomment provides an overview of the decision,exploring the significance of recognising rapeas a crime against humanity within the contextof other developments in the area of wartimerape and sexual violence. The comment alsoprovides a brief review of the decision inlight of the authors previous scepticism aboutthe capacity for the Tribunal meaningfully toaddress violence against women. The commentconcludes that while many aspects of thedecision are promising, the war crimes trialitself may offer a limiting arena within whichto address wartime rape.

Performing Legal Order: Some Feminist Thoughts on International Criminal Law

This article argues that international criminal law, like its domestic counterpart, is a contradictory site for feminist activism. While it offers some important tools for recognising, naming, and giving credence to the realities of womens lives in times of conflict, international criminal law is also a limited and limiting arena for feminist-inspired social change. My objective in this article is to highlight some of those limitations, not to counsel against continuing feminist activism, but to start a conversation about some of the costs, risks and implications for feminist strategy in continuing to work within the structures of international criminal law.

Finding the Homosexual in Women’s Rights: The Christian Right in International Politics

In recent years, organizations on the American Christian Right (CR) have become established actors at the United Nations, working to limit international agreement on developments seen as ‘anti-family’, such as women’s rights, population policy and abortion. At the same time, the Vatican has established itself as a strong voice opposing international law and policy on women’s rights. For both actors, women’s rights represent a direct challenge to the ‘natural family’ and hence a particular world vision premised on a sexual division of labour. While women’s rights is a central preoccupation for both actors, ‘homosexuality’ and the prospect of lesbian and gay rights and ‘gay marriage’ is also a recurrent theme, intricately connected to women’s rights. This article explores the relationship between women’s rights and homosexuality as drawn by these two actors. It asks why, in an international arena that offers little concrete recognition of, or protection for, lesbian and gay identities both the CR and Vatican are concerned about a presumed homosexual agenda. It also explores what role the debate about women’s rights plays in facilitating this ‘homosexual agenda’. In addressing these questions, this article seeks to explore, and raise further questions about international women’s rights as a language for international discussion about social relations.

Knowing Women: Translating Patriarchy in International Criminal Law

This article considers how international criminal courts produce knowledge about women’s experiences of large-scale violence. In 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia concluded that the crime of genocide had been committed in Srebrenica in 1995 and that the patriarchal nature of the Bosnian Muslim community was key to the genocide. This paper examines the processes by which the trial and appeal chambers came to know, and author an account of this community as patriarchal. I examine the transcripts of three witnesses who testified about the surviving community of Bosnian Muslim women, tracing how evidence was shaped and reshaped in the courtroom and then in the trial and appeal judgments. I argue here for the importance of exploring the mediating practices and actors that produce legal knowledge, to better understand how complex recognition of gendered harm unfolds, and is sometimes curtailed, through international criminal adjudication.

Introduction to ‘Sexual Movements and Gendered Boundaries: Legal Negotiations of the Global and the Local’:

This special issue examines the interplay between national and international legal arenas in the governance and regulation of gender and sexuality. For scholars of gender, sexuality and law, there is much to cheer at the international level. We might, for instance, celebrate the unprecedented visibility and activity of both feminist and lesbian and gay movements. The result of that increased profile is a strengthening of policy and laws governing a variety of social justice issues, from violence against women to HIV/AIDS. ‘Women’s rights as human rights’ has become a familiar slogan, bandied about by even the most unlikely international bureaucrat. Similarly, lesbian and gay rights, while hotly resisted by many, have attracted a phalanx of notable supporters. Influential human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have dedicated ‘gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered’ departments, and the complex human rights machinery of the United Nations is increasingly recognizing and responding to human rights violations of lesbian and gay men (Wintemute, 1995; Sanders, 1996; Stychin, 2003; Miller and Vance, 2004). This increased visibility and an apparent erosion of traditional exclusions present opportunities and challenges for scholars and activists alike. For the contributors to this special issue (Bunting, 2005; Munro, 2005; De Vries, 2005; Doezema, 2005; Millbank, 2005) from Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and the UK, this new international climate represents not so much the end point of a progressive narrative, but, rather, the point of entry into the debate – a critical moment for asking new questions.

Book Review: A Country Unmasked: Inside South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission:

initiatives towards victims can only really be understood within an analysis of the institutional and systemic character of criminal justice. A further problem is that ‘victim’ is itself rather a shapeless concept. As Young points out, many crimes do not fall easily into a model where there is one offender and one victim. Many crimes are defined in such a way that there might seem to be either many or no victims (preventive offences), and even in crimes such as burglary, it may be difficult to identify a single victim. While his solution of a ‘multi-victim perspective’ is elegant, and offers a ready connection to a model of restorative justice, it is not clear that this addresses the real nature of the problem. Ironically, the difficulty is revealed in the terms in which victim advocates have pressed their case for recognition. In claiming that the victims of crime suffer ‘secondary victimization’ in the way that they are treated by the criminal justice system, they demonstrate flexibility of the idea of ‘victimhood’. This may be a great strength of the concept, but it is also a weakness. If we adopt these wider understandings of victimhood, then it is undoubtedly the case that we are all the victims of crime – through raised taxes, insurance premiums and the general loss of a sense security – but at this point the concept becomes so general that it begins to lose any critical purchase. It is disappointing that in a book of this sort there should be so little recognition of the differences between different categories of victim, and the potential consequences of this. It is also important to consider the way in which the term ‘victim’ is used in our culture. It is arguable that we live in a ‘victim culture’ in which those found guilty of committing crimes are increasingly ready to declare their own status as victims (of biology, social circumstance, society). This is something that can only partially be explained by the invocation of the cycle that turns some victims into offenders – the abused who becomes the abuser. More significant surely is the change in the wider culture that makes the status of victim desirable as a means of expressing a perceived injustice or pressing a claim for compensation. While the essays in the book provide a summary of the diverse ways in which this claim is made in the field of criminal justice, it would have benefited greatly from more prolonged sceptical engagement with some of these issues.