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A recent judgment by a lower court in Germany brought the problem of ritual male circumcision to the consciousness of the wider public and legal academia. This essay weighs in on this emerging discussion and argues that ritual male circumcision is not covered by parental authority. It first considers and dismisses the best interest of the child test, which is the most widely used test of parental authority in legal practice. Instead, the essay proposes what it terms the autonomy conception of parental authority, according to which parental authority must be exercised such as to ensure that the child will become an autonomous adult. While parents may raise their child in line with their ethical, including religious, convictions, respect for his autonomy requires that this be done in a way that allows the child to later distance himself from these values; this implies, among other things, that irreversible physical changes are impermissible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which was adopted in 1998 and came into force in 2002, enumerates a broader range of sex crimes than any previous instrument of international criminal law. These include rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilisation and ‘any other form of sexual violence’ of a comparable gravity, as war crimes and crimes against humanity. In applying the new residual crime of ‘any other form of sexual violence’, judges and prosecutors in the ICC have had to confront the complex question of what makes violence ‘sexual violence’, and how can the ‘gravity’ of sexual violence be determined, where that is a legal requirement. This article examines how these questions have been addressed in two cases currently before the ICC, from the situations in the Central African Republic and Kenya, where attempts have been made to prosecute forced nudity, forced male circumcision and mutilation of the male genitals as ‘sexual violence’ within the meaning of the Rome Statute. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Ritual Male Infant Circumcission and Human Rights" in the 2015(2) issue.