Academic literature on the topic 'Sex crimes – Rwanda'

Under the orthodox approach, war crimes were considered crimes under international law only as a means to enforce international rules of warfare at the national level. This basic principle of international law was challenged and eventually discarded following the trials of war criminals before the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Tokyo Tribunal. However, the revolutionary precedent established by the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials did not develop into a fully-fledged body of international criminal rules, known as ‘international criminal law’, until the end of the Cold War, when the International Crimina

A matter raised consistently by eminent personalities asked to report on atrocities in Africa, such as former South African President Thabo Mbeki, is the utilization of traditional justice mechanisms known to Africans. Their use has been limited to Gacaca courts in Rwanda, set up in haste and subject to much criticism. However, there exist several types and models of traditional justice mechanisms at the African level. The contribution of these sui generis mechanisms towards accountability for heinous crimes is largely unaddressed in academic literature. This chapter intends to fill this gap b

This chapter concerns the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the ad hoc Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, as well as other courts with international elements. It begins with a discussion of the ICC, and then addresses more briefly the residual mechanism set up to deal with the remaining work of the two ad hoc Tribunals and finally, even more briefly, other courts with international elements. The ICC in particular was borne out of the success of the ad hoc Tribunals, although other courts with international elements have since been created. All these courts and tribunals s

The chapter starts with claims made for the potential historical value of a set of juridical by-products: the evidence gathered, presented, and scrutinized in international criminal courts. Recently, criminologists and others have started to make use of resources generated or collected by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) to describe and analyse international crimes. This chapter argues that while evidence and transcripts from international criminal courts have great potential as a source of data for analyses in criminology, and by extension other social sciences and historical research, they need to be handled with care. The chapter compares judicial and scholarly approaches, examines access and transparency issues around the construction of a body of evidence in the trial process and matters relating to witnesses. They make a strong case for using the ICTY as part of scholarly efforts to make sense of the violent disintegration of State and society in Yugoslavia.

This chapter reviews the state of North American geographical research on Africa in the 1990s. During the 1980s research on Africa dwelt on the many crises, some real and some imagined, usually sensationalized by the media, such as the collapse of the state in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Somalia, and Rwanda and the economic shocks of structural adjustment programs. The 1990s witnessed momentous positive changes. For example, apartheid ended in South Africa and emerging democratic systems replaced dictatorial regimes in Malawi and Zambia. Persuaded that Africa had made progress on many fronts largely due to self-generated advances, some scholars began to highlight the positive new developments (Gaile and Ferguson 1996). Due to space limitations, selecting works to include in this review has been difficult. In many instances we stayed within five cited works (first authorship) for anyone scholar to ensure focus on the most important works and to achieve a sense of balance in the works cited. Thus, research reviewed in this chapter should be treated as a sample of the variety and quality of North American geographical work on Africa. One major challenge was where to draw the boundary between “geography,” “not quite geography,” and “by North American authors” versus others. In these days of globalized research paradigms, geography has benefited tremendously from interchanging ideas with other social and natural science disciplines. Thus, separating North American geographic research in the 1990s from other groundbreaking works that profoundly influence the discipline of geography is difficult. For example, while the empirical subject matter included agriculture, health, gender, and development issues, the related theoretical paradigm often included representation, discourse, resistance, and indigenous development within broader frameworks influenced by the ideas of social science scholars such as Foucault (1970, 1977, 1980), Said (1978), Sen (1981, 1990), and Scott (1977, 1987). This chapter engages these debates. Building upon T. J. Bassett’s (1989) review of research in the 1980s, the chapter develops a typology for the growing research on African issues and related theoretical orientations (Table 36.1). The reviewed works fall into the three main subdisciplines of geography—human geography (by far the most dominant), physical geography now commonly referred to as earth systems science or global change studies, and geographic information systems (GIS).