SEKSUALNO NASILJE U ORUŽANOM SUKOBU: IZMEĐU MEĐUNARODNE I BOSANSKOHERCEGOVAČKE TEORIJE I PRAKSE
SEXUAL VIOLENCE: BETWEEN THE INTERNATIONAL AND THE BOSNIAN AND HERZEGOVINIAN THEORY AND PRACTICE

Summary/Abstract: Considering the remarking impact of the Rome statute from 1998 on the way Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Criminal law defines crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of genocide, this paper will question the legal concepts of sexual violence in its various types of occurrences, among which rape, forced pregnancy, sexual slavery, forced prostitution and forced sterilization. With a temporal and territorial focus on the international armed conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the same forms of sexual violence will be contextualized to simultaneously identify additional implications at the legal level, as well as special categories of victims that are incompletely or only partially recognized. The links between the statutes of international courts and tribunals, on one side, and the consequential Bosnian and Herzegovinian understanding in theory and practice of the aforementioned criminal offenses, on the other, will be examined. The theoretical framework will hence be a chronological identification of the development stages in the building of modern-day legal conceptions, that is, an analysis on either two or three levels: local conceptions in opposition to international ones, and, additionally, on the separated levels of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and other courts and tribunals. Through the usage of comparative and categorization conclusions from the previously mentioned section, topics such as the judicial interpretation of gender when dealing with similar cases will be problematized, just as the everyday consequences on victims from specific categories. The paper primarily focuses on the legal aspect of sexual violence in armed conflicts. However, it also provides an analysis of the transitional justice process in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Specifically, the paper discusses the challenges of implementing victim reparation as a mechanism for achieving transitional justice.

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