GBM Blog

The Nobel Women's Initiative Delegation to the ICC: Part 1 - Gender Justice

June 15, 2010 - 11:50AM
Published by Hannah Smith

Today's blog is the first of a two-part special from our guest blogger Kelly Fish of the Nobel Women's Initiative.

From May 28 to June 5, the Nobel Women’s Initiative led a delegation to the first ever Review Conference of the International Criminal Court. The delegation, led by Nobel Laureates Wangari Maathai and Shirin Ebadi, called for a global end to impunity and a strengthening of laws that punish perpetrators of crimes against women.

Currently, all of the cases of the ICC include investigations into the atrocious human rights violations that have been committed against women. National laws and regulations that protect women, such as the proper recording and documentation of rapes, must be implemented and enforced to compliment the ICC's work.

Gender Justice

On June 1, Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai was invited to participate in the Women’s Court, organized by Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice. The Women's Court was organized to identify the serious women's human rights abuses perpetrated during conflict and to call attention to the fact that these crimes are often not investigated of prosecuted as vigorously as other breaches of international humanitarian law.

Professor Maathai moderated the session presented by Ugandan women. She opened the session by reflecting on the experience of Kenya during the post-election violence and the trauma that we all carry with us: "all of us are here because we care about these issues."

We listened as three Ugandan women activists reflected on the situation of women in Northern Uganda and women's involvement in peace building activities. The women constructed a comprehensive picture of the situation of women on the ground: the challenges and security risks they face, their fight to be included in peace and justice processes, as well as their proposed solutions.

Finally, a Ugandan survivor of gender-based violence provided the Women's Court with her personal testimony. For the first time in front of an audience, this courageous woman shared her visibly painful story of abduction by the Lord's Resistance Army and forced marriage to an LRA fighter. A stunned audience listened on as she recounted her return from the bush with two children she had borne with the man who was forced upon her. She spoke of the isolation from her family and community and the enduring burden she now carries as not only a survivor of tremendous violence, but as a woman now living with HIV/AIDS. Her future was taken away from her, she says. She concluded saying she just doesn't know what will happen to her children, should she die.

Her story made the plight of the ICC tangible. Her experience speaks to the tremendous challenges that women face, not only in conflict, but in the pursuit of healing, reconciliation, and some form of justice. Indeed, we must understand that the ICC cannot be the total solution to each of these challenges, but it is vital that the Court recognize and attempt to further engage in the complexities of bringing such gross women's rights violations to the Court in order for women to see some form of justice for the great injustices they have and continue to endure. It also reinforces the needs for national mechanisms to complement the work of the court and the urgency of psychosocial care and support for communities emerging from such trauma.

The Ugandan panel was followed by panels for women from the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic. When the Sudan panel took the table at the end of the day, it was impossible not to notice the presence of male Sudanese civil society activists. They volunteered to try to fill the space left by the Sudanese women unable to travel to the ICC Review Conference due to security concerns. Indeed, as three other activists boarded their plane in Khartoum en route to Kampala, they were removed from the plane and had their passports confiscated by the Sudanese authorities.

We couldn't help but feel the loss of the true voices of Sudanese women in the ICC Review Conference - a gathering that directly impacts their daily lives. It is yet another reminder of the tremendous obstructions Sudanese are facing in their everyday plight to advocate on behalf of women's human rights.

Wangari Maathai on Women and the International Criminal Court: