Rape at Rome: Feminist Interventions in the Criminalization of Sex-Related Violence in Positive International Criminal Law

This Article examines the work of organized feminism in the formation of new international criminal tribunals over the course of the 1990s. It focuses on the statutes establishing the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and the International Criminal Court (ICC). It offers a description of the evolving organizational style of feminists involved in the legislative processes leading to the establishment of these courts, and a description of their reform agenda read against the outcomes in each court-establishing statute. At each stage, the Article counts up the feminist victories and defeats, giving (I hope) a clear picture of how “feminist” the resulting codes really are. The goal is to produce an assessment of the ideological/political investments that feminists brought to their work on the statutes for the international criminal tribunals (ICTs) and the ICC, and of the degree to which the statutory regimes contain rules that allow participants in adjudication under these statutes to put those ideological/political investments into action. My conclusions in this Article are two. First, feminist organizational style and capacity evolved rapidly over the course of the 1990s. Second, though there were some disagreements among the feminists involved, the organizational style was overwhelmingly coalitional, resulting in a literary “trace” of feminist work that is almost devoid of manifest internal conflict. The consensus that emerged as the feminists' joint representation of their worldview, argument repertoire, and reform agenda was not, as one might expect, a median liberal feminist view that split the difference between conservative and leftist feminist ideologies. Instead, the manifest consensus view was an updated radical feminism, strongly committed to a structuralist understanding of male domination and female subordination. There was some tension on a few issues between structuralist and liberal-individualist femininists (a distinction I will describe in detail below), but it was muted by the coalitional style adopted by feminists and compromised usually in the direction of structuralist rule choices.