The paper explores changing attitude of the international society to war rape and other sexual violence that took place in the armed conflicts after the end of the Cold War. The evolution from shameful misprision to dynamic efforts aiming at penalization of the crime of sexual violence is marked, firstly, by the statutes of the international tribunals (two ad hoc and one permanent) and, secondly, by judgments of these criminal courts. The crucial documents of tribunals (e.g.of cases Furundžija, Akayesu, Kunarac) constituted milestones on the way to punishing perpetrators of abhorrent sexual crimes. They reflect the process of preparing or even creating international law terms and instruments that have been necessary to prosecute and punish rapists and other violators. The effects are inter alia a progressive definition of rape, determination to prosecute perpetrators of the most massive and systematic crimes and recognising (under specific circumstances) sexual crime as crimes against humanity and genocide.
This paper depicts significant events, as well as important doctrines, which affected the traditional comprehension of the terms “international armed conflict” and “non-international armed conflict”, thus showing the process of adapting this distinction from the realm of facts to the realm of law. Although the division between international and non-international armed conflicts is quite old, it was not until the mid-20th century when it was first incorporated in international law. Before the Article 3 common to four Geneva Conventions was established, international law had been dealing only with rights and duties of parts to the international conflicts, regarding non-international conflicts as internal affairs of particular states. Because for many years it had been pointless to seek for norms of international law which generally and abstractly would determine humanitarian standards in case of an outbreak of internal conflict, regulations incorporated in Geneva Conventions of 1949 were first regarded as huge success. Nevertheless, currently they are commonly considered to be too vague and not precise enough. Moreover, they seem to be inadequate to modern armed conflicts – so called “transnational conflicts” or “new wars”, which do not fit in legal frames of “international armed conflict” or “non-international armed conflict”, created over 60 years ago.
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Dostęp do pełnego tekstu na zewnętrznej witrynie WWW
Armed conflicts were always triggered by a potential profit that sides of a conflict wanted to gain. Once, it was traditionally understood loot. The 20th century and tragic experience of subsequent wars have brought far-reaching legal regulations of contemporary armed conflicts. As a result, not only international humanitarian law of armed conflicts was established and far-reaching consequences concerning restrictions on the possibility of conducting wars were introduced, but also the right of loot, which before constituted an immanent element of armed conflicts, was significantly limited. Traditional country’s right to gain unlimited profit from wars at the expense of occupied territories and the defeated was significantly limited, and in some cases was even subjectively limited, what particularly refers to cultural goods. What is more, soldiers were irretrievably deprived of rights to plunder and loot. However, all that did not undermine economic causes of wars, although this factor is no longer reduced to traditionally understood iure praedae. The contemporary right of loot has different content, and different entities benefit from it nowadays. It is the consequence of a fact that not only states participate now in wars, but also other, non-state entities that treat a war as a lucrative business. It is as well associated with a problem of asymmetry of contemporary armed conflicts. Therefore, the term iure praedae, which comes from Grotius, needs to be redefined.
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