{"id":379167,"date":"2018-09-30T17:14:14","date_gmt":"2018-09-30T16:14:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/will-the-new-crimes-against-humanity-treaty-protect-women-and-lgbti-persons\/"},"modified":"2018-09-30T17:14:14","modified_gmt":"2018-09-30T16:14:14","slug":"will-the-new-crimes-against-humanity-treaty-protect-women-and-lgbti-persons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/will-the-new-crimes-against-humanity-treaty-protect-women-and-lgbti-persons\/","title":{"rendered":"Will the New Crimes Against Humanity Treaty Protect Women and LGBTI Persons?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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If you haven\u2019t heard about the <\/span>new treaty on crimes against humanity<\/a> <\/span>that the United Nations has in the works, you\u2019re not alone. Most haven\u2019t.<\/p>\n

What you should know is that if this treaty goes forward for adoption in its current draft form, only some \u2013 not all \u2013 people will be protected from crimes against humanity like massacres, rape, torture and persecution. This is because the treaty adopts an outdated definition of gender that some states will inevitably use to shirk their responsibility for addressing gender-based crimes.<\/p>\n

We need this treaty, first of all, because it could help bring such atrocities to light and perpetrators to justice. The only permanent court in existence for prosecuting such crimes, the International Criminal Court (ICC), doesn\u2019t have a mechanism for interstate cooperation, and few states have crimes against humanity incorporated into their domestic legislation.<\/p>\n

The problem is that the draft treaty adopts the definition of gender from the Rome Statute, which established the ICC, stating: \u201cit is understood that the term \u2018gender\u2019 refers to the two sexes, male and female, within the context of society.\u201d<\/p>\n

On its own, the definition does not make clear who is protected. While it\u2019s understood to be inclusive of all gendered crimes that meet the threshold of persecution, there has never been a successful prosecution at the ICC. Not surprisingly, no other mechanism has adopted this opaque definition.<\/p>\n

To understand how this definition of gender came about we have to go back about 20 years. During the 1990s, women\u2019s rights advocates rallied for the term \u201cgender\u201d instead of \u201csex\u201d to be listed alongside race, ethnicity, religion and other protected groups from persecution. A small, socially conservative opposition objected, fearing the term \u201cgender\u201d would more broadly affirm LGBTI rights as human rights. They also wanted to limit the scope of women\u2019s rights.<\/p>\n

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If you haven\u2019t heard about the new treaty on crimes against humanity that the United Nations has in the works, you\u2019re not alone. Most haven\u2019t. What you should know is that if this treaty goes forward for adoption in its current draft form, only some \u2013 not all \u2013 people will be protected from crimes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-379167","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379167\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}