Event Description
Join PILPG on May 26 from 12 pm to 1 pm ET for a conversation with experts regarding the Office of the Prosecutor’s recently released a Policy on the Crime of Gender Persecution.
War-time abuses against women, girls, LGBTIQ persons are not new. They are as old as human history, appearing in modern international criminal law records as far back as World War II. Yet, beyond sexual violence, gender-based crimes are rarely documented when they happen and perpetrators are hardly ever held accountable for them. As a result, these crimes are often excluded from consideration by tribunals, and in effect, are left out of history. To this end, the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court embarked on a year-long process to develop a new policy paper on the crime against humanity of persecution on the grounds of gender.
This roundtable will discuss the development of the policy paper, the legal substance and how it will guide the Office of the Prosecutor, and the ways governments and civil society can utilize the text in national and local settings.
The event will be moderated by PILPG Managing Director Milena Sterio.
This is part of the PILPG Thought Leadership Initiative. The Initiative focuses on prominent international law and international affairs topics and organizes monthly expert roundtables to share expertise and reflections from our work on peace negotiations, post-conflict constitution drafting, and war crimes prosecution.
Speakers
Professor Lisa Davis
Prof. Lisa Davis is an Associate Professor of Law and Co- Director of the Human Rights and Gender Justice Clinic (formerly named International Women’s Human Rights Clinic). Prof. Davis has written and reported extensively on international human rights and gender issues including women’s rights and LGBTQI+ rights, with a focus on peace building and security issues in conflict and disaster settings. Professor Davis has provided expert remarks before the UN Security Council, U.S. Congress, U.K. Parliament, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and various international human rights bodies and is also a member of the JRR-UN Women SGBV Justice Experts Roster.In the case of Karen Atala and Daughters v. Chile, Prof. Davis co-authored the only amicus curiae brief to argue that sexual orientation and gender identity are protected classes under international law. In 2012, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued a ground- breaking decision, providing for an explicit prohibition of discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. In 2010, Prof. Davis served as lead counsel for the Inter- American Commission petition on behalf of displaced Haitian women and girls, which resulted in the Commission’s first-ever precautionary measures decision recognising State responsibility to prevent third-party gender-based violence. Prof. Davis was subsequently awarded the 2011 People’s Choice Gavel Award by their peers for the decision.
Dr. Yvonne Dutton
Dr. Yvonne Dutton is a Senior Legal Advisor at PILPG. She is a Professor of Law at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law teaching evidence, criminal law, criminal procedure, international criminal law, international law, and comparative law. Professor Dutton graduated from Columbia Law School, where she served on the Columbia Law Review and was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar (all years). She also holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder. After graduating from Columbia Law School, Professor Dutton clerked for the Honorable William C. Conner, United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York. Professor Dutton has practiced law as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, where she tried narcotics trafficking and organized crime cases. She also practiced as a civil litigator in law firms in New York and California. Professor Dutton’s research interests include international criminal law, international human rights law, and maritime piracy. Broadly speaking, her scholarship examines questions about international cooperation and the role and effectiveness of international institutions in deterring and holding accountable those who commit crimes of international concern. In May 2013, her book entitled Rules, Politics, and the International Criminal Court: Committing to the Court was published by Routledge. Professor Dutton has recently been involved with providing technical assistance with the development of framework laws on transitional justice and the harmonization of Ukrainian domestic law with international humanitarian law and the drafting of a legal charter for the Ukrainian peacebuilding/documentation center.
Michelle Jarvis
Ms. Jarvis has worked in the international criminal justice field for 22 years and is presently the Deputy Head of the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism (Syria) (IIIM), having taken up the post in December 2017. Prior to that she was the Deputy to the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT), where she had oversight of legal issues across the Office of the Prosecutor. She acted as counsel in a series of cases before the ICTY and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda setting significant international criminal law precedents. Ms. Jarvis has worked extensively to bring visibility to the experiences of marginalized groups during accountability processes and to strengthen legal responses, including initiating the IIIM’s proactive thematic strategies on a victim/survivor-centred approach, gender, children/youth and broader justice objectives to promote inclusive justice for Syria. She has co-authored two books and numerous articles on the subject of gender and armed conflict. Ms. Jarvis initiated and was the inaugural Coordinator of the Prosecuting Conflict-Related Sexual Violence Network, set up within the International Association of Prosecutors and she is presently a member of the Expert Group on the Establishment of an International Gender Justice Practitioner Hub. Ms. Jarvis has contributed to capacity building efforts to address mass atrocity in (post) conflict zones around the world, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, South Sudan, Colombia, Cambodia and Syria. She is also an Advisory Board member of the Center for Climate Crime Analysis and a member of the high-level Advisory Group for the Anchoring Accountability for Mass Atrocities project by the Oxford Program on International Peace and Security. Prior to her work in international criminal law, Ms. Jarvis was a litigator in Australia, where her roles included improving women’s access to justice. Ms. Jarvis holds a Master’s degree in law from the University of Toronto as well as degrees in law and economics from the University of Adelaide.
René Urueña
René Urueña is a professor at Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia), a Max Planck Fellow in Law, and is currently a visiting research professor at the University of Lapland (Finland). He works on international law, has been counsel and several times an expert witness before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and served as an adviser of the Selection Committee of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (Colombia). René has been a Fellow at New York University, a docent at the Institute for Global Law and Policy at the University of Harvard, and a visiting professor at the City University of New York, and at the universities of Tel-Aviv, Utah, and Helsinki. He received his LL.M. (laudatur) and his Doctor of Law (eximia cum laude) from the University of Helsinki, and hold a postgraduate degree in economics from Universidad de los Andes (Colombia)
MODERATOR
Professor Milena Sterio
Milena Sterio is the Managing Director of PILPG and the Charles R. Emrick Jr. - Calfee Halter & Griswold Professor of Law at Cleveland State University’s Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. She is a leading expert on international law, international criminal law and human rights. Sterio leads PILPG’s Thought Leadership Initiative.
Sterio is one of six permanent editors of the prestigious IntLawGrrls blog, and a frequent contributor to the blog focused on international law, policy and practice. In the spring of 2013, Sterio was selected as a Fulbright Scholar, spending the semester in Baku, Azerbaijan, at Baku State University. While in Baku, she had the opportunity to teach and conduct research on secession issues under international law related to the province of Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh. Serving as a maritime piracy law expert, she has participated in meetings of the United Nations Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia as well as in the work of the United Nations Global Counterterrorism Forum. Sterio has also assisted piracy prosecutions in Mauritius, Kenya and the Seychelles Islands. Sterio is a graduate of Cornell Law School and the University of Paris I, and was an associate in the New York City firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton before joining the ranks of academia full time. She has published seven books and numerous law review articles. Her latest book, “The Syrian Conflict’s Impact on International Law,” (co-authored with Paul Williams and Michael Scharf) was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.