Böll.Global 12 | Use of Sexualised Violence as a Weapon in Ukraine and the Tigray Region of Ethiopia: How can we fight these war crimes more effectively?

Sexualised violence is systematically used as a targeted weapon of war in numerous conflicts worldwide.

Rape, sexual abuse, forced pregnancy and nudity, sexual slavery and genital mutilation - all of these crimes and many more are forms of sexualised violence that were considered by the general global public for a long time to be tragic, isolated cases that can occur during armed conflict. The fact that they follow a certain pattern and are committed with a similar intention was generally overlooked.

By now there are some resolutions and declarations to fight sexualised violence, according to which, charges can be brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the cases tried as war crimes and crimes against humanity. The latter was also confirmed by the recent historic ruling at the Koblenz higher regional court as a result of intense efforts by the Syrian lawyers, when a senior Syrian state official was found guilty of crimes against humanity for the systematic murder and torture of prisoners.

In this twelfth issue of Böll.Global we are taking a look at the way sexualised violence and the like is being used strategically as a weapon in the current brutal and escalating wars in Ukraine and Tigray. We will discuss the political intentions behind these acts of violence and retrospectively analyse how the crimes of sexualised war violence in Bosnia, Congo and Rwanda have helped raise international awareness of and discussion about strategies to fight it.
What instruments exist to monitor and prosecute and have already been successfully implemented? In which areas and using which institutional structures should politics in Germany, Europe and worldwide substantiate and strengthen their efforts to penalise or even prevent sexualised war violence faster and more effectively? These are the questions we would like to discuss with our guests:

• Kateryna Cherepakha, Director of the human rights organisation La Strada-Ukraine
• Jeannette Böhme, Consultant for Advocacy and Human Rights medica mondiale e.V.
• Alexandra Lily Kather, LL.M., Legal Consultant in international law and international criminal law, Center for Justice and Accountability
• Franziska Ulm-Düsterhöft, Africa expert Amnesty International Germany

Layla Al-Zubaidi, Deputy Director of the International Department at Heinrich Böll Foundation will moderate the discussion.

Languages: German/English - simultaneous interpretation
 

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