1. Wartime Rape and the International Criminal Court Tracing the Involvement of the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice in International Norm Creation Open University 2009 University of Hildesheim 12 June 2009 Lourdes Veneracion-Rallonza (Miriam College, Philippines)
Prior to the negotiations on the ICC, a lot were happening internationally “as far as forms for women’s human rights advocacy at that time” --- UN conferences like the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women, the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), and the UNGA adoption of the UN Declaration on VAW. the Women’s Caucus capitalized on institutionalized mechanisms which opened the space for the participation of a growing a globalizing women’s movement in the international discursive arena. They drew their mandate from CEDAW --- a hard law on women’s human rights with the force of a treaty --- to exact state compliance to women’s human rights norms as well as to demand from international organizations their obligation to ensure gender equality in the crafting of new policies and institutions. At the same time, the Women’s Caucus built on the gains achieved by the women’s movement in the Vienna, Cairo, and Beijing conferences on women’s human rights. The outcome documents of these international conferences, although largely perceived as soft laws , nevertheless provided women’s groups the moral authority to demand actions from governments that have committed themselves to improving women’s lives. In this sense, these documents are seen as consensus documents which embody the strength of consensus of the international community even if they are not ‘hard core’ legal documents. In terms of engaging with international institutions, “people who formed the nucleus at the very beginning as what would become the Women’s Caucus advocacy” derived their experiences from and enhanced their expertise through these conferences. “Within the UN, the momentum existed and the ground was fertile for the integration of women’s perspectives/experiences into a formal international criminal justice mechanism like the ICC.”
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