Crimes against humanity are widespread or systemic criminal acts which are committed by or on behalf of a de facto authority, usually by or on behalf of a state, that grossly violate human rights. Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity do not have to take place within the context of wars, and they apply to widespread practices rather than acts which are committed by individuals. Although crimes against humanity apply to acts which are committed by or on behalf of authorities, they do not need to be part of an official policy, and they only need to be tolerated by authorities. The first prosecution for crimes against humanity took place during the Nuremberg trials. Initially considered for legal use, widely in international law, following the Holocaust, a global standard of human rights was articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Political groups or states that violate or incite violations of human rights norms, as they are listed in the Declaration, are expressions of the political pathologies which are associated with crimes against humanity.
Sexual violence is any sexual act or attempt to obtain a sexual act by violence or coercion, act to traffic a person, or act directed against a person's sexuality, regardless of the relationship to the victim. It occurs in times of peace and armed conflict situations, is widespread, and is considered to be one of the most traumatic, pervasive, and most common human rights violations.
Human rights in Uganda as a state relates to the difficulties in the achievement of international rights standards for all citizens. These difficulties centre upon the provision of proper sanitation facilities, internal displacement, development of adequate infrastructure, as well as the mistreatment of the LGBT community, women, and children. Nonetheless, Uganda is, as per the Relief Web sponsored Humanitarian Profile – 2012, making considerable developments in this area.
According to a U.S. Department of Justice study, men rape and sexually assault Native American women more than 2.5 times than any other ethnicity. The same study shows that men victimize Native American women the most by all races out of all populations in the United States.
Violence against women (VAW), also known as gender-based violence and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), are violent acts primarily or exclusively committed by men or boys against women or girls. Such violence is often considered a form of hate crime, committed against women or girls specifically because they are female, and can take many forms.
Rape can be categorized in different ways: for example, by reference to the situation in which it occurs, by the identity or characteristics of the victim, and by the identity or characteristics of the perpetrator. These categories are referred to as types of rape. The types described below are not mutually exclusive: a given rape can fit into multiple categories, by for example being both a prison rape and a gang rape, or both a custodial rape and the rape of a child.
Domestic violence is a severe issue in Russia. According to Human Rights Watch, citing RIA Novosti, as many as 36,000 women and 26,000 children faced daily abuse at home in 2013. According to official MVD data, in 2015 around 1060 people died of domestic violence in Russia. Of them, 756 were men and 304 women. According to an independent study of 2,200 women in fifty cities and towns in Russia, 70% have experienced at least one form of gender-based violence in the home—physical, psychological, economic, or sexual.
Violence against women in Peru is defined as harassment or violence propagated against those who are born women. Intimate partner violence (IPV) is the most common form of gender-based violence that occurs though it can occur concurrently with sexual and emotional violence.
As sexual violence affects all parts of society, the responses that arise to combat it are comprehensive, taking place on the individual, administrative, legal, and social levels. These responses can be categorized as:
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the east of the country in particular, has been described as the "Rape Capital of the World," and the prevalence and intensity of all forms of sexual violence has been described as the worst in the world. Human Rights Watch defines sexual violence as "an act of a sexual nature by force, or by threat of force or coercion," and rape as "a form of sexual violence during which the body of a person is invaded, resulting in penetration, however slight, of any part of the body of the victim, with a sexual organ, or of the anal or genital opening of the victim with any object or other part of the body."
Violence against women in Guatemala reached severe levels during the long-running Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996), and the continuing impact of that conflict has contributed to the present high levels of violence against women in that nation. During the armed conflict, rape was used as a weapon of war.
Prosecution of gender-targeted crimes is the legal proceedings to prosecute crimes such as rape and domestic violence. The earliest documented prosecution of gender-based/targeted crimes is from 1474 when Sir Peter von Hagenbach was convicted for rapes committed by his troops. However, the trial was only successful in indicting Sir von Hagenbach with the charge of rape because the war in which the rapes occurred was "undeclared" and thus the rapes were considered illegal only because of this. Gender-targeted crimes continued to be prosecuted, but it was not until after World War II when an international criminal tribunal – the International Military Tribunal for the Far East – were officers charged for being responsible of the gender-targeted crimes and other crimes against humanity. Despite the various rape charges, the Charter of the Tokyo Tribunal did not make references to rape, and rape was considered as subordinate to other war crimes. This is also the situation for other tribunals that followed, but with the establishments of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), there was more attention to the prosecution of gender-targeted crimes with each of the statutes explicitly referring to rape and other forms of gender-targeted violence.
The term international framework of sexual violence refers to the collection of international legal instruments – such as treaties, conventions, protocols, case law, declarations, resolutions and recommendations – developed in the 20th and 21st century to address the problem of sexual violence. The framework seeks to establish and recognise the right all human beings to not experience sexual violence, to prevent sexual violence from being committed wherever possible, to punish perpetrators of sexual violence, and to provide care for victims of sexual violence. The standards set by this framework are intended to be adopted and implemented by governments around the world in order to protect their citizens against sexual violence.
Throughout the ongoing Darfur genocide in the Darfur war there has been a systematic campaign of rape, which has been used as a weapon of war, in the ethnic cleansing of black Africans from the region. The majority of rapes have been carried out by the Sudanese government forces and the Janjaweed paramilitary groups. The actions of the Janjaweed have been described as genocidal rape, with not just women, but children also being raped, as well as babies being bludgeoned to death and the sexual mutilation of victims being commonplace.
Nadia Murad Basee Taha is an Iraqi Yazidi human rights activist who lives in Germany. In 2014, she was kidnapped from her hometown Kocho and held by the Islamic State for three months.
Gabrielle Louise McIntyre (Australian) is an international legal practitioner, jurist, and the Chairperson of the Seychelles' Truth, Reconciliation and National Unity Commission.
The Global Justice Center (GJC) is an international human rights and humanitarian law organization aiming to advance gender equality by helping to implement and enforce human rights laws. Headquartered in New York City and led by Akila Radhakrishnan, the GJC is a member of the United Nations NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security. The GJC works with national and international Non-governmental organizations, the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and others to promote the progressive, feminist interpretation and application of international law.
Carceral feminism is a critical term for types of feminism that advocate for enhancing and increasing prison sentences that deal with feminist and gender issues. It is the belief that harsher and longer prison sentences will help work towards solving these issues. The phrase "carceral feminism" was coined by Elizabeth Bernstein, a feminist sociologist, in her 2007 article, "The Sexual Politics of the 'New Abolitionism'". Examining the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States, Bernstein introduced the term to describe a type of feminist activism which casts all forms of sexual labor as sex trafficking. She sees this as a retrograde step, suggesting it erodes the rights of women in the sex industry, and takes the focus off other important feminist issues, and expands the neoliberal agenda.
Al-Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz Ag Mohamed Ag Mahmoud is a Malian who allegedly joined Ansar Dine in early 2012 and became an interpreter and administrator of the Islamic Police in Timbuktu during N. Mali conflict. As of September 2019, al-Hassan is in the custody of the International Criminal Court, for trial on the charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes carried out during 2012 and 2013, including rape and sexual slavery under Article 8 2.(e)(vi) of the Rome Statute of the ICC.
