The road to gender justice : intersectional perspectives at the International Criminal Court

Abstract

This thesis explains how intersectional perspectives can contribute to gender justice within ICC proceedings. The first chapter focuses on gender justice, SGBV in international law, and feminist legal perspectives on the prosecution of these crimes. Following, specific attention is dedicated to previous ICC cases concerning SGBV for analysis (from Lubanga, Gombo, Kenyatta, and Ntaganda to Al-Hassan) and development happening in the field of gender justice in ICL. The Al Hassan case, now ongoing, could be the keystone in the Court’s jurisprudence regarding genderbased violence and intersectionality, being the first one to be adjudicated on a gender-based ground. The third and final chapter stresses how intersectionality has been poorly adopted in the context of ICL. This criterion (developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw) born in the legal context and already applied in human rights regional courts, can assume increasingly radical importance at the ICC. In 2014, the OTP Policy Paper on Sexual and Gender-Based Crimes explicitly mentioned the need to use an intersectional approach while examining SGBV, referring to interconnected grounds of persecution. Some criticism of the possibility of using this method in the resolution of cases has been linked to Art. 22 of the Rome Statute, which codifies the principle of legality in ICL, but this work analyzes how this norm does not constitute a limit if rightfully connected to IHRL. The overall finding is that the ICC could find great efficacy in embracing intersectional perspectives to resolve its cases and reach true gender justice at the international level.