The use of sexual violence against women as a weapon of war in the jurisprudence of the International Criminal Court

Abstract

In the 21st century, gender violence against women continues to be a scourge of humanity. This situation is even worse during armed conflicts, in which sexual violence against women is often used as a weapon of war. In this context, this article aims to identify the contributions of the jurisprudence of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in combating this problem. To this end, bibliographic research was carried out on national and comparative doctrine, as well as documentary research on the jurisprudence and documents of the ICC. Thus, it was found that the first time the ICC convicted someone of sexual violence was only in 2019, in the Ntaganda case, after other cases in which the accused were acquitted for technical reasons. This change in the ICC's position can be attributed to the efforts of its Prosecutor's Office, which mobilized for the gender perspective to be included in the trials, starting to look at the pain and suffering of women, victims of the cruelest forms of violence, instead of the blind application of the norm, which ignores human vulnerabilities, products of historically constructed prejudices.