Mainstreaming Gender: The Influence of Women\u27s Networks on Prosecuting Sexual Violence at the International Criminal Court

The fall of the Soviet Union in combination with the failures of the international community to intervene in the genocides of the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda spurred a new enthusiasm for human rights as a wholly independent movement, termed the human rights wave. This paradigm shift, identified by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, was an embrace of human rights rooted in the redemption of past wrongs. This project is structured as a jurisprudential genealogy that will explore the human rights wave in the context of the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice, a facet of the transnational women’s network, and their quest to mainstream sexual and gender based violence into law at the International Criminal Court. Timing was essential to the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice’s formation before the Rome Conference. At the same time as the human rights wave characterized by Hoffmann emerged, a furor for anti-impunity prosecutions engulfed the focus of the international community. These two phenomena came together at a time in which organizing at the United Nations over gender issues was about to reach a fever pitch. The thirst for anti-impunity sparked a renewed interest in international criminal tribunals, resulting in the ad hoc tribunals and the International Criminal Court forming throughout the 1990s. This project argues that the confluence of these aforementioned events provided the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice with a fortuitous opportunity to ride the human rights wave and institutionalize gender in a way that other activists would not be able to accomplish in contemporary times