Prosecutor’s Office Training on Sexual and Gender Violence

In November 2008, Professor Catharine A. MacKinnon was appointed as Special Gender Adviser to the Prosecutor. She has since been providing the Office with advice on sexual and gender violence. From 9 to 11 June, she provided a 3-day training course entitled “Evolution of Gender Crimes,” and will return for further trainings on additional topics.

The recognition of gender and sexual violence crimes is a relatively recent phenomenon in international criminal jurisprudence. One of the academic architects of this recognition, Professor MacKinnon, trained members of the Office of the Prosecutor from 9 – 11 June. She pioneered the concept of sexual crimes being gendered and has been developing this in both theory, and practice since the mid-1970s. She was co-counsel in the lawsuit Kadic v. Karadzic, during which the concept of rape constituting an act of genocide was judicially recognized for the first time in 1995, and in 2000 won a damage award of $745 million in the same case. She is currently Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School and Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She has also been working with Equality Now, an NGO promoting international sex equality rights for women.

Sexual crimes are central to many of the cases currently under investigation and prosecution by the Office, including the cases against Germain Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui, President Omar Al Bashir, Ahmad Harun and Ali Kushayb, and Jean-Pierre Bemba.

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For more information, please contact:

Ms Nicola Fletcher, OTP Media Liaison
+31 (0)70 515 8071 
[email protected]

Source: Office of the Prosecutor