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Sex trafficking continues to remain a global endemic, despite being the subject of international criminal law since early twentieth century. This article will critique both the outdated international anti-sex trafficking regime, the Palermo Protocol, and a contemporary domestic regime, the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015. After arguing that both legal frameworks are insufficient due to their criminal law foundations, it will then propose as a replacement an anti-sex trafficking paradigm grounded in human rights. Finally, the article argues that the full potential of this paradigm will only be realised once labour rights are recognised as human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, the research and training network Children Born of War (CHIBOW) seeks to explore the lives of children born to local mothers and fathered by enemy soldiers, occupying forces, and locally stationed and peacekeeping forces during conflicts of the past one hundred years. Born both through mutually consenting "love relationships" and from rape, children born of war are a hidden population, relatively understudied and seldom spoken about in public spheres. Fift een early career researchers at eleven academic institutes across Europe will address this topic from a multidisciplinary perspective. This training network will act as a platform to share the life stories of people aff ected by war in the most profound ways and to alleviate some of the silence surrounding their experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on promoting domestic accountability for conflict related to sexual violence focusing the internal conflicts of Guatemala, Peru, and Colombia. Topics discussed include use of international law for prosecuting conflict-related to sexual violence; creating framework for proving sexual violence crimes, and establishing criminal liability; and setting influential precedents for promoting accountability at the domestic courts.

The article focuses on the shifting of wartime sexual violence which is being conceptualized as a crime against honor and collateral damage of war, of secondary importance, to a weapon of war, used to advance ethnic cleansing and genocidal campaigns. It mentions use of joint criminal enterprise (JCE) liability to prosecute leaders for sexual violence at the ad hoc tribunals. It also mentions use of the common plan modes of liability by International Criminal Court (ICC).

At different times, and for different reasons, Kosovo informal and organized women’s networks have dealt with wartime sexual violence in different ways: they have followed either a strategy of silence or one of speech. Throughout, they have struggled to disentangle gender from ethnicity, straddling the line between a deep connection with local culture and domestic and international norms and agendas. This article tells their story, which in broader terms is the story of the subjectivity of women’s rights activists—domestic and international—as it connects with the normative framework of transitional justice. The case of Kosovo shows that transitional justice meaningfully engages local actors as a human rights project sensitive to political change, more than as a “toolkit” which packages truth, reconciliation and justice with recipes for implementation. The case of Kosovo also confirms that lobbying by women’s networks is crucial to the inclusion of women’s perspectives in transitional justice, and that the exclusion of women from decision making results in a net loss for women’s concerns. I would take the argument even further, and suggest that the inclusion of women and their agendas, as well as the struggle by women’s networks for inclusion, is necessary for human rights transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the feminist critique that progress in the classification of sexual violence crimes within international criminal law has not been matched by sufficient legal enforcement. It takes the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) as a case study, exploring the various myths, investigative failures and procedural developments that have hindered the ECCC's effective investigation of sexual violence. The article argues that while there is a need to adopt a nuanced perspective of the many gender inequalities facing women, it remains crucial that sexual violence is adequately investigated and prosecuted, due to the normative value of such prosecutions. It concludes with some suggestions as to how the ECCC can improve accountability for such crimes, but also highlights lessons that future courts can learn from the ECCC's failures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the International Criminal Court's (ICC's) issuance of a judgement in the 2014 case Prosecutor v. Katanga which deals with international criminal laws, criminal defendant Germain Katanga, and crimes against humanity. According to the article, the court outlines policies to improve prosecutorial outcomes in cases involving sexual and gender-based crimes. War crime litigation and the Rome Statute are mentioned, along with the ICC's jurisdiction and sexual slavery laws.

This article discusses aspects of the origin and development of jurisprudence relating to the prosecution of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in the context of international criminal law. It examines a selection of archival material from the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) and other bodies connected to it, noting that the UNWCC was the first multinational criminal law organization to explicitly endorse SGBV crimes as international crimes. UNWCC-supported trials in both Europe and Asia suggest that rape committed in the context of armed conflict or situations of mass violence was punishable as a serious crime nearly 70 years ago. Moreover, many of the theories of liability used by contemporary tribunals today were used in the UNWCC-supported cases. The authors maintain that the UNWCC archives are not only valuable for tribunals prosecuting conflict-related SGBV cases today, but the jurisprudence emerging from UNWCC-supported cases may also be quite relevant to contemporary policy debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Major advances in international criminal law and procedure rose on the trusses of judicially elucidated sources of international law — custom and general principles. These sources depend on the crucial art of derivation advanced by the architect of modern international criminal justice, President Antonio Cassese. What has transformed international criminal justice into flourishing law able to address changing configurations of violence is the development of the art of finding law in the dark and wilds of murky unwritten norms. President Cassese pioneered paths through a perilous bog. ‘[T]he law lives in persons,’ and to understand the law one must study the vision of the persons who animate the law, another great scholar and judge wrote. In that spirit, this article explores advances in the art of elucidating custom and general principles in international criminal justice through the lens of President Cassese’s legacies and views on legality, sovereignty and the imperatives of humanity. The result are major landmarks in the prosecution of international crimes, such as developing protections in armed conflict and against sexual violence — and also progress in developing defenses and protections for the accused. The article distills lessons to guide the elucidation of customary international law and general principles from national systems and to regulate the transposition of concepts from national criminal law into international criminal law. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The main argument in this article is that the academic as well as policy related focus on sexual violence has brought women's concerns to the table of international security concerns, namely to the United Nations Security Council through a number of resolutions in recent years. This has been important in order to create better protection measures and bring women's agency to the forefront of political concern. However, the woman centered focus on protection measures might have overshadowed the role of the perpetrators of sexual violence crimes and the need to focus on prevention measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The express inclusion of various crimes of gender-based and sexual violence in the Rome Statute is closely connected with the increased international attention given to these crimes in recent years, most particularly in the form of prosecutions by the ad hoc tribunals. However, while these first prosecutions were celebrated as revolutionary, a conflict has emerged between the consent-based and the broader coercive circumstance approaches to rape. Not only do the International Criminal Court (ICC) instruments as they stand do little to clarify the issue but, bearing in mind the operation of Article 21, there are likely to be various competing pressures on the ICC in defining and prosecuting rape. This article argues that the ICC can address this challenge by providing a clear statement in its first judgments on point that the central principle underlying the definition of rape under international law is the protection of sexual autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the needs of reforms in the laws for the protection of women during armed conflicts. Topics discussed include role of the international law and international humanitarian law in women protection, role of the Geneva Convention in protecting the victim of war crimes and punishment for sexual violence under case law. It further discusses the role of women in conflict resolution and peace building.