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With the resurgence of the field of international criminal justice in recent decades, expectations have increasingly been placed on international criminal courts to construct consistent and authoritative historical narratives about the mass atrocity situations that fall within their purview. We conclude by arguing that criminal prosecutions alone are insufficient and that, if we are to end the rape of women and girls in war (and peace) we need a radical restructuring of gender relations across every sphere of social and political life. We argue, that while commendable in some ways, contemporary approaches to rape in war risk reinforcing aspects of women’s status which contribute to the targeting of women for rape and continue to displace women from the centre to the margins in debates and practices surrounding rape in both war and peace time. This paper briefly maps historical attitudes towards rape in war, outlines some analyses and explanations of why rape in war occurs and finally turns more substantively to recent efforts by the international community to prosecute rape as a war crime and a crime against humanity. Nevertheless, until the establishment of the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia – there was very little concern regarding the need to address the rape of women in conflict. Women were sanctioned as the spoils of war in biblical times and more recently it has been claimed that it is more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in modern conflict.
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The rape of women has for centuries been an endemic feature of war, yet perpetrators largely go unpunished. I will argue that due to the impassioned political controversy over rape within populist, scholarly and legal realms, not only are the substantive problems associated with rape prosecutions often left obscured but problematic rape hierarchies are reified and victim experiences further marginalised. The point of this article is not to situate myself in either camp but rather to examine the power of international criminal law to pronounce meaning, demarcate the gravity of crimes and silence alternative stories. The first is the feminist political project, which sought to delineate wartime rape as a crime of grave magnitude that warranted explicit treatment under international criminal law the second is the postmodernist feminist discourse, which questions the desirability of fixating on sexual violence against women in conflict. The article draws attention to two discourses. The aim of this article is to examine the heightened consciousness around wartime sexual violence and its ascendancy as a crime against "humanity". Feminist scholars, however, warn that the unprecedented attention to wartime sexual violence within international criminal law has had wide-ranging and unintended consequences. Since the early 1990s, wartime rape has been successfully prosecuted as a war crime, a crime against humanity and a crime of genocide.
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Such legal memory is not stable and settled, but shifts and changes shape over the passage of time. As such, I argue that the “selective memory” of historical war crimes trials can be both an injustice and a collective memory of the past.
#Rule of rose rape trial
In this article, I argue that the proceedings and judgment of the Tokyo Trial have been frequently deployed to both confirm and deny the plight of the comfort women, particularly among revisionists and victim advocates The article illustrates not only the power of law to dictate how and what past events will be remembered, but also the transformative power of law as a site of memory contestation. Part of the legacy of the Tokyo Trial is the debate that has ensued over the collective memory of injustice, including critiques of “victor’s justice”, as well as the failure of the Tribunal to adequately prosecute crimes such as the vivisection of prisoners, biological warfare and the systematic sexual enslavement of the so-called “comfort women”. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE or Tokyo Tribunal) was established in 1946 to try Japanese defendants for war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace. International criminal prosecutions for serious violations of human rights are not only connected to a collective consciousness about the past they also shape contemporary memory contestation.