Event Description
Join PILPG, The Women in International Law Interest Group (WILIG), and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe on September 15 from 12 pm to 1 pm ET for a conversation with experts regarding the Office of the Prosecutor’s Policy on the Crime of Gender Persecution. In this conversation, we will focus on the gender persecution element: intent to discriminate.
As with all forms of persecution, accountability for gender persecution requires recognition and understanding of the discrimination that underlies the crime. This roundtable will look at this discriminatory intent element within the gender persecution prohibition in the Rome Statute and discuss how a holistic understanding of the reasons why perpetrators commit persecutory acts can work toward elimination of discrimination and break cycles of violence. The speakers will also unpack the intent versus motive to commit crimes debate and how gender persecution may, and frequently does, intersect with and constitute multiple forms of persecution.
The panelists will include Special Adviser on Gender Persecution to the ICC Prosecutor Professor Lisa Davis; Special Adviser on Sexual Violence in Conflict to the International Criminal Court Prosecutor Kim Thuy Seelinger; Secretary General, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) Madeleine Rees; and Trial lawyer at the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC Pubudu Sachithanandan.
This will be the fourth event of the series on the Policy on the Crime of Gender Persecution. The first event was held on May 26, 2023 titled Dusting off the Law Books on Gender Persecution: Why a Policy on the Crime against Humanity of Gender Persecution? The second event was held on June 27, 2023 titled Dusting off the Law Books on Gender Persecution: Fundamental Rights. The third event was held on July 14, 2023 titled Dusting off the Law Books on Gender Persecution: Element Two, Targeted Groups.
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.
Madeleine Rees
Madeleine Rees, OBE is a British lawyer and current Secretary General of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
She became a lawyer in 1990 and within four years was made partner in a large UK law firm, specializing in discrimination law. In the UK, she also worked on behalf of both the Commission for Racial Equality and the Equal Opportunities Commission, mainly on developing strategies to establish rights under domestic law.
Extending her skills to the international sphere, Madeleine brought cases to the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court in Luxembourg. She was cited as one of the leading lawyers in the field of discrimination in the Chambers directory of British lawyers.
In 1998 Madeleine was appointed as Head of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and their gender expert in Bosnia and Herzegovina, during which tenure she gained a reputation for her work on counter trafficking, and was portrayed in the film, “The Whistleblower” by Vanessa Redgrave. As head of the Office, Madeleine also worked on the rule of law, gender and post-conflict, transitional justice and the protection of social and economic rights.
From September 2006 to April 2010, Madeleine served as the Head of the Women’s Rights and Gender Unit for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
In 2010 she took over as Secretary General of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Rees was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to human rights, particularly women's rights, and international peace and security.
Professor Kim Thuy Seelinger
Prof. Kim Thuy Seelinger is an expert on sexual violence in the context of armed conflict and forced displacement. Prof. Seelinger’s teaching and scholarship focus on the complexities of providing protection from, and accountability for, conflict-related sexual violence. Drawing from her legal and social science research in over a dozen countries, Prof. Seelinger provides technical assistance to international and national actors working on war crimes trials, legislative reform, and support services for survivors. At the policy level, she served as an inaugural member of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ Advisory Group on Gender, Forced Displacement, and Protection and an expert commentator on the International Protocol on the Documentation and Investigation of Sexual Violence in Conflict (2014, 2017).
She co-founded the Missing Peace Initiative, which connects academics, policymakers, and practitioners focused on conflict-related sexual violence. Prof. Seelinger chairs the Board of Civitas Maxima, a Geneva-based organization that conducts war crimes investigations in partnership with African human rights defenders, and serves as technical advisor to the Global Survivors’ Fund, established by 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winners Dr Denis Mukwege and Ms Nadia Murad.
Seelinger is currently faculty at Washington University, where she is a Research Associate Professor at the Brown School of Social Work, Public Health and Social Policy and a Visiting Professor at the School of Law. She also directs the Center for Human Rights, Gender, and Migration at the Institute for Public Health. Prior to joining Washington University in 2019, she spent nearly a decade at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she directed the award-winning Sexual Violence Program at the Human Rights Center from 2010-2019. She is a member of the New York State Bar.
Pubudu Sachithanandan
Mr. Pubudu Sachithanandan is a Trial lawyer at the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC. In the past 18 years he has served on teams investigating and prosecuting crimes that occurred in Uganda, Rwanda, Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His ICC cases include Katanga & Ngudjolo, Kony et al, Ongwen, Al Bashir, Abu Garda, Banda & Jerbo, and Harun & Kushayb. He also served on the Prosecution teams for the Bizimana and Ngirabatware cases at the ICTR.
Mr. Sachithanandan holds an MSt in International Human Rights Law (Oxford), an LLM and LLB (University of London), and has completed Programs on Advanced Principles of Humanitarian Law and Policy, as well as International Humanitarian Law and Counter-terrorism (Harvard University).
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.