Source: Annex 4
Note: The data refer to the existence of laws specifically prohibiting each form of violence. See Annex 4 for details.

Source: ICTY data are UN Women analysis using data from Mischkowski and Mlinarevic 2009 and information collected from court documents. Data for the ICTR and the SCSL are based on UN Women analysis of court documents. Data as of April 2011.
Note: *This column does not include cases that have been dropped, the indictment was withdrawn, or the accused died before or during trial, or cases transferred to the national courts. The indictment count for the SCSL does not include the five indicted for contempt of court or the two for professional misconduct. Open cases where the trial is ongoing or the accused remains a fugitive are also not included in the table, of which there are 19 in the ICTY, 32 in the ICTR and two in the SCSL. **For the ICTY, the figure includes 19 judgments currently on appeal, similarly for the ICTR, 10 judgments are currently on appeal.

The bashingantahe are instrumental in the maintenance of community cohesion and the restoration of peace in their collines, the smallest administrative units in the country. Through sensitization of leaders on women’s rights and the amendment of the bashingantahe charter, women became accepted as part of the institution, taking part in decision-making. They now make up 40 percent of the committee members of the bashingantahe.

As a result, awareness of sexual and gender-based violence and other violations of women’s rights has increased. Burundian women’s organizations have been campaigning for a new law to guarantee women’s inheritance rights. Although resistant at first, basingantahe leaders have been speaking out in public in support of the proposed law, including on local radio, and have become important allies in the campaign.

Liberian women gather inside a peace hut.

For 14 years, women in Liberia bore the brunt of two brutal wars characterized by the use of child soldiers, mass displacement and widespread sexual and gender-based violence. Women were also instrumental in ending the fighting in the country and bringing peace to its people.

One such woman, Leymah Gbowee, a social worker and mother of six, brought together several dozen women in 2002 to pray for peace after watching her country descend into a war that made violence, rape and murder a part of daily existence. In doing so, she launched a movement of ordinary women who campaigned to help put an end to Liberia’s civil war and pave the way for the election of Africa’s first female Head of State, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

The women came together in their thousands, with the support of the Women in Peacekeeping Network (WIPNET), to push for a meeting with then President Charles Taylor to extract a promise from him to attend peace talks in Ghana. Leymah Gbowee subsequently led a delegation of Liberian women to Ghana to continue to apply pressure on the warring factions during the peace process. They monitored the talks and staged a silent protest outside the presidential palace in Accra. When the talks stalled, the women barricaded the room, refusing to let the men out until a peace agreement was signed. Eventually, an agreement was reached but the real work of engendering justice and reconciliation had only just begun.

In West African culture, a palava hut is a round structure with a thatched roof usually located in the middle of the compound of a community elder. In palava huts, chiefs and elders would traditionally resolve disputes and settle conflicts. In the context of post-conflict Liberia, palava huts became a forum where individuals could admit their ‘wrongful acts’ and seek a pardon from the community.

WIPNET has co-opted and reinvented the concept of the palava hut to support the process of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of combatants. Liberian women decided to build palava huts and call them peace huts instead, a place for women to meet, to discuss problems, to provide support to one another and to build peace in their communities.

The women act as mediators, meeting regularly to share information about problems in the community and to make plans to resolve them. The number of participants varies, from a few dozen to two hundred women. Community members come to the peace huts with grievances, including cases of rape, as well as those related to land and religious or ethnic disputes.

The peace huts are a place of sanctuary and safety for women escaping domestic violence. Members of the peace huts work with the local police to identify those suspected of crimes against women, ensuring that they are arrested and interrogated. The women address child support issues, monitor early warning signs of conflict, expose corrupt politicians, lead peaceful demonstrations, engage in adult literacy and income-generating programmes, and pray and sing together.

The peace hut movement is growing, with at least nine in existence in five counties of Liberia. The movement has shown the power of women working together to build and maintain peace in their communities.

‘Conflict can provide women with opportunities to break out of stereotypes and stifling societal patterns… If women seize these opportunities, transformation is possible. The challenge is to protect the seeds of transformation sown during the upheaval and to use them to grow the transformation in the transitional period of reconstruction.’

Anu Pillay

The decision related to a complaint lodged by a rape survivor from the Philippines alleging that gender-based myths and misconceptions about rape were relied on by the judge, leading to the acquittal of the alleged rapist. The complainant identified seven ‘rape myths’ related to her own behaviour and reaction to the attack, as well as to the characteristics of her attacker. These included the idea that rape victims are timid or easily cowed and that when a woman knows her attacker, consent is implied.

The Committee found that the woman had been ‘re-victimized’ through her treatment by the court and stressed that ‘stereotyping affects women’s rights to a fair and just trial’. They further warned that ‘the judiciary must take caution not to create inflexible standards of what women or girls should be, or what they should have done when confronted with a situation of rape, based merely on preconceived notions of what defines a rape victim or a victim of gender-based violence’.

The Committee recommended that the Government award compensation and put in place appropriate training for judges, lawyers, law enforcement officers and medical personnel, to avoid re-victimizing women and ‘to ensure that personal mores and values do not affect decision-making’.

As of April 2011, the Government had not yet formally responded to the Committee. However, even before the Optional Protocol case, the judiciary in the Philippines had already recognized the need to increase gender sensitivity in decision-making. As a result, the Philippine Judiciary Academy and the Ateneo Human Rights Center developed an interactive bench book, which tracks decisions on women’s rights cases, making relevant jurisprudence and legal reasoning available to judges, and conducted a series of trainings for court personnel.