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War Crimes Against Women: Prosecution in International War Crimes Tribunals. By Kelly Dawn Askin. The Hague, London, Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1997. Pp. xviii, 455. Index. $133; L84.
Although women have been the targets of abuse in wars throughout history, it was documentation of the systematic use of rape in the conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda that catalyzed international lawyers to take a keen interest in the issue. Many recent law review articles focus on developments in humanitarian law and war crimes against women, but Kelly Dawn Askin, visiting scholar at the Center for Civil and Human Rights, Notre Dame University, is one of the first authors to write an entire book on the subject. War Crimes Against Women, the initial volume in a two-part series, seeks to survey early historical developments on the issue and to discuss "why gender crimes must be, and how they can be, prosecuted in the Yugoslav Tribunal" (p. xiii). A second volume will discuss the war crimes trials before the Rwanda Tribunal and detail specific cases before the Yugoslav Tribunal. War Crimes Against Women makes an important contribution to our understanding of the ways in which international tribunals have responded and should respond to gender-based war crimes.
War Crimes Against Women is divided into seven chapters and one appendix. The first chapter, which surveys the treatment of gender-based violence under humanitarian law prior to World War II, makes the most unique contribution to the literature on humanitarian law. Askin weaves an evocative narrative of how recognition and treatment of gender-based violence have evolved in international humanitarian law. From ancient times through World War II, she explains, soldiers treated conquered women as property of the enemy nation, to be used by the conquering army without restriction, like other booty of war. "Then, as now, women as combatants or noncombatants, were treated differently than men as combatants or noncombatants. Then, as now, rape was considered an effective weapon of war, a 'spoil' of war, and an inevitable consequence of war" (pp. 33-34).
Askin makes the important point that, despite the pervasiveness of sexual violence against women in both peacetime and wartime, rape has long been considered a punishable violation of the customs of war. Askin sets the date that rape was...