On July 10, just 10 days after its 10^th anniversary, the ICC delivered its first sentence.  The ICC sentenced Thomas Lubanga, a Congolese militia leader, to 14 years in prison for the recruitment and use of child soldiers as a part of his rebel army, the Union of Congolese Patriots, from 2002-2003.  Throughout that time, Lubanga and his army abducted, trained and used children to terrorize and kill villagers in the Ituri region of the DRC.  While the justices clearly agreed that Lubanga deserved to be sentenced, one of the three judges, Elizabeth Odio Benito of Costa Rica, wrote a dissenting opinion saying that the sentence had been too lenient.  Judge Benito suggested that the sentence should have been longer so as to properly reflect the extent of damage done to the child soldiers and their families.

One example of the type of damage that Judge Benito may have been referring to is sexual violence.  Among the crimes included in Lubanga’s trial, sexual violence was noticeably missing from the list. This was seemingly a product of the prosecutor’s shortcomings.  Presiding judge Adrian Fulford criticized the prosecution saying that “Not only did the former prosecutor fail to apply to include sexual violence or sexual slavery at any stage during these proceedings, including in the original charges, but he actively opposed taking this step during the trial when he submitted that it would cause unfairness to the accused if he was convicted on this basis.”  The ICC’s rules of procedure allow for additional crimes to be introduced and considered during the sentencing stage.  However, despite this capability, the judges determined that there was insufficient evidence presented to link sexual violence to the proven child soldier recruitment, and sexual violence therefore played no part in Lubanga’s sentence.

This glaring oversight, regardless of whether it be largely at the hands of the prosecution or the judges, is yet another example of the failure to recognize the plight of the female child soldier.  Female child soldiers are subjected to the same horrific conditions and treatment as all other child soldiers but suffer even further through sexual violence and diminished ability to escape.  Grace Akallo, a former child soldier in the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda described how she and other girls as young as 7 were given as wives, where they would then be regularly subjected to sexual abuse.  They were sent to fight at the front lines while pregnant, with children on their backs, and some were even left with no choice other than to give birth on the front lines.  There is undoubtedly a shared stigma among all child soldiers, but the female experience is significantly different from that of the male and failure to take additional measures to recognize this distinction is a failure to protect women’s rights.

Brigid Inder, executive director of the Women’s Initiative for Gender Justice pointed out the contradictory nature of the scenario because “the Rome Statute contains the most advanced articulation in international criminal law of acts of sexual violence committed, particularly in armed conflict situations, and yet the first case for the ICC didn’t include any charges for gender-based crimes.”  Judge Sang-Hyun Song, President of the ICC said that “the ICC promotes a model of gender-sensitive justice… the needs of women and children receive special attention in the ICC,” and that “international justice promises to serve as a warning to those who intend to exploit and abuse the most vulnerable members of our society that they will be tried, prosecuted and punished.”  While these remarks are hopeful and comforting, the recent performance by the prosecution and the sentence that followed demonstrated a weak showing that would hardly serve as an effective warning to other exploiters of vulnerable groups.  Lubanga’s sentence and the absence of sexual violence from the charges against him highlight the unfortunate ease with which women’s rights can be overlooked and this is unacceptable.  A lesson must be learned from the failure to distinguish and defend the specific rights of the female child soldier.  It is critical that in future ICC trials and sentencing, all parties involved take it upon themselves to ensure that women’s rights in any and all circumstances are protected and promoted, as a necessary prerequisite pursuant to the “gender-sensitive justice” that Judge Sang-Hyung Song spoke of.

On July 9, the 52^nd session of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women began at UN headquarters in New York. This year marks the 30^th anniversary of the Committee, which was established in 1982 as a means of ensuring compliance with the articles of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). CEDAW was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1979 and remains one of the most important documents outlining the rights of women around the world.

In her remarks at the opening ceremony of the session, Michelle Bachelet—head of UN Women and former president of Chile—addressed a number of obstacles in the global struggle for gender equality. Among many concerns, she emphasized the importance of gender quotas in national governments and legislatures. The impact on young girls of seeing women in positions of power, she said, was the first step in ensuring greater women’s participation in government and politics for future generations. To illustrate this point, Ms. Bachelet told a story shared with her by the first female president of Finland, Tarja Halonen, who served in the position for 12 year from 2000 to 2012.

President Halonen was speaking to a room of Finnish kindergarten students, all of whom had been born after Ms. Halonen’s election to office. The president began asking the children what they wanted to be when they grew up. She asked a little boy in the group if maybe he would like to be the president of Finland when he got older. The little boy looked confused and replied, “No, because boys can’t be president in Finland.”

Post By: Adrian Lewis

With the 2015 target of the Millennium Development Goals approaching, the United Nations recently issued a report detailing the progress made on each goal.  While some goals have made major gains and will reach their targets by 2015, “Goal 5: Improve maternal health”, is not seeing the gains other goals have made.  The stated target of Goal 5 was to “reduce by three quarters, between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality ratio”.  Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia account for most of the maternal mortality cases.

The report notes that maternal mortality rates could decrease by ensuring that women receive ante-natal care, give birth in the presence of skilled health professionals, and have unobstructed access to family planning and contraceptives.  Though the report mentions access to family planning and contraceptives, it makes no explicit mention of access to safe abortions.  The connection between maternal mortality rates and lack of access to safe abortions is critical, and cannot be ignored.  The CEDAW Committee has repeatedly made the connection between maternal mortality and unsafe abortions, noting the “high rates of maternal mortality due to high numbers of abortions among adolescents, and unsafe, clandestine, and illegal abortions”.

July’s summit on family planning in London raised $2.6 billion dollars to improve access to family planning and contraceptives for an additional 120 million women by 2020.  One article suggests that “[w]hat vaccinations are to infant mortality, contraception is to maternal mortality.”  The organizers of the family planning summit claim that the money raised will result in 200,000 fewer women dying in pregnancy.  While it is important for women to be able to obtain contraceptives wherever they are in the world, it is equally as important that women have access to safe abortions if contraceptives fail, or if a rape victim seeks an abortion to help end the psychological trauma still lingering from her assault.   If women are forced to resort to unsafe abortions because they are illegal, unaffordable, or unobtainable, the maternal mortality rate will stay steady.

Hard times happen. They can happen anytime and anywhere. They can happen on a scale as small as a community or family or as large as an entire region or country. The causes range from economic crises to armed conflicts and everything in between. In fact, the one thing that seems to be universal about hard times is that they lead to less respect for women’s rights.

In Nepal, girls are essentially sold into slavery when their families are struggling with debt. The ethnic Tharu practice a form of indentured servitude known as “kamlari”. Tharu families struggling with extreme poverty ease their debt burdens by leasing their daughters to higher caste landlords to use as servants for as little as $30 a year. Girls as young as six enter the system and are forced to do menial labor. These girls suffer a wide range of abuses, including beatings and rape, and are not allowed to go to school. Activists have been struggling to free girls from the kamlari system but the system has persisted in isolated parts of Nepal.

In Afghanistan and Pakistan, girls are traded as a form of dispute settlement. Daughters are given to rival parties to settle disputes in a practice known as “swara” or “vani”. Swara is used to settle crimes such as murder, adultery, and kidnapping. A daughter from the family of the perpetrator (usually the girl’s father or brother) is forced to marry into the family of the victim. The girls are often quite young and the men they are forced to marry are often significantly older. Swara brides are treated terribly by their in-laws and husbands. They are treated like servants, constantly taunted, frequently beaten, and sometimes even killed.

In Niger, there is a tradition of marrying girls off at a very young age. Niger has the world’s highest rate of child marriage with approximately 50% of girls marrying before the age of fifteen, with some as young as seven. Girls are married off in exchange for dowries, including livestock and cash, which can be very helpful for families struggling with poverty. The country is currently in the middle of a hunger crisis resulting from a severe drought. Therefore, families that were already poor are now finding it even more difficult to put food on the table and there is a legitimate fear that families will begin marrying off their daughters with greater frequency and at younger ages if the crisis continues. Child brides in Niger lead difficult lives. They are often married to men who are much older, they are unable to attend school, forced to have sexual intercourse, denied freedom, beaten, and often abandoned when their polygamous husbands take younger brides. Additionally, child brides tend to be impregnated long before their bodies are ready to bear children, which often leads to serious health problems and even death.

In Madagascar, girls are frequently forced into prostitution when their families don’t have enough money to survive. In the southern region of the island, they have what is called “tsenan’ampela” (literally girls market). Families send their girls to market towns without money, forcing them to prostitute themselves at the tsenan’ampela until they have enough money to buy food and supplies for the family.

In times of conflict, rape and sexual assault are frequently used against women as weapons of war. This is currently happening in Syria in the conflict between President Bashar al-Assad and anti-government forces. Women Under Siege has documented 81 instances of sexual assault since anti-government demonstrations began in March 2011. There is evidence that forces are targeting victims related to the Free Syrian Army as a way to punish the rebels with reports of soldiers going into houses looking for male members of the rebel forces and then raping the women. Many of the women have been killed after being assaulted, which is a tactic used in conflict zones to show complete control over the enemy.

The situations described above are just a handful of examples of how women and girls suffer disproportionately in times of hardship, and the list could go on and on. The list of excuses for these types of discrimination is equally long and includes explanations blaming culture, tradition, inevitability, and ignorance. However, the truth is that there is no excuse for sacrificing women’s rights in hard times. According to Article 1 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), “discrimination against women” shall mean any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of sex which has the effect or purpose of impairing or nullifying the recognition, enjoyment or exercise by women, irrespective of their marital status, on a basis of equality of men and women, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural, civil or any other field.” This broad definition of discrimination against women means that for at least the 187 countries that are a party to CEDAW, there is an obligation to ensure that women’s rights are respected and that women do not suffer disproportionately in any circumstance, including times of hardship. As such, women and girls should never be turned into a commodity and sold off when their families need food and money, and they should never brutalized for crimes they have not committed or battles they have not fought. When times get tough, women should be given an equal say in finding a solution.