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Kelly Dawn Askin, War Crimes Against Women: Prosecution in International War Crimes Tribunals, The Hague: Kluwer Law International 1997, 455 pp.
For centuries rape as a part of war was so commonplace that no special attention was necessary. This changed when systematic mass rapes in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s became known. Public shock about their brutality, and about violations of international humanitarian law in general, contributed to the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia by the United Nations Security Council.1 It also drew the attention of many international lawyers and academics to the "problem" of women casualties of war.2
This is the context of Kelly Dawn Askin's book, meant to be the first volume of a two-part series about the prosecution of war crimes against women. It aims at providing an historical overview of the development of international humanitarian law in general, and an analysis of how the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes tribunals dealt with gender specific war crimes.3 The second volume of the book, which will address the prosecution of gender crimes by the Yugoslav and Rwandan war crimes tribunals, is - according to the publisher - not expected to appear before mid2003.4 However, war crimes against women in the territory of the former Yugoslavia and their prosecution by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) are already considered in two chapters of the first volume.
The book consists of an introduction, eight chapters, a conclusion, an appendix and a very extensive bibliography. The introduction recalls that war has always existed and that where there is war, there is sexual assault. The fundamental premise of the book "is that all forms of sexual assaults committed during the course of armed conflict, for any reason whatsoever, must be treated as serious violations of humanitarian law, and prosecuted as such".5 The introduction provides a very brief historical overview of international war crimes tribunals and some legal definitions of sex crimes. It concludes by recalling that women are subjected to the same atrocities as men, but that they are also victims of additional crimes because of their gender.
Humanitarian law prior to the SecondWorldWar is analysed in the first chapter. In ancient Greece sexual assaults, even...