WUNRN
ECCHR - European Center for
Constitutional & Human Rights
REDRESS
FOR RAPE
Using
International Jurisprudence on Rape as a Form of Torture or Other
Ill-Treatment
Direct Link to Full 124-Page 2013 Publication:
INTRODUCTION
Rape is an egregious crime
with devastating consequences for victims. However, until relatively recently
it has not been the subject of serious attention within the international human
rights law framework. Rape – at both the domestic and international level – was
traditionally largely invisible, or trivialised as a "private
matter", an unfortunate incident, the result of a woman’s careless
conduct, or the inevitable result of war.1 As
such, it was not cast as the responsibility of states, was rarely addressed in
international human rights discourse, and was not to be found explicitly within
the human rights violations prohibited by the core international conventions
adopted during the course of the twentieth century.2
The past two decades have
seen a significant normative change in this area. It is now clearly established
at the international level that rape is a crime of the highest order, that
states do have the responsibility to prevent and respond to it, whoever
commits it, and that survivors of rape are entitled to the same level of
protection and response as any other victim of violence. This normative change
has started to have an impact in achieving accountability in some high profile
individual cases, has increased scrutiny by international human rights bodies
on the practices of states, and may have helped to improve responses of
authorities in some jurisdictions. However the reality is that rape continues
on a massive scale, and the majority of victims of rape around the world – both
women and men – face almost insurmountable barriers to justice.
This report hopes to
provide a useful resource for those seeking to build upon these developments,
helping to translate them into change for individuals and communities. It does
so by focusing on one strategy which has been fruitfully used both to bring
rape within the international legal framework, and to seek justice in
individual cases: making the link between rape and torture and other prohibited
ill-treatment.
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