More than 130 Sudanese women took their own lives in 2024 in anticipation of being raped by members of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) during Sudan’s ongoing war (Lydia Gichuki, 2024). These suicides were not isolated acts of desperation but a direct consequence of a geopolitical interests that refuse to intervene, denying these women protection, recourse, and justice. Across the world, impunity for war crimes remains deeply entrenched in circles of violence such as in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan or Syria. Too often, perpetrators are not held accountable and brought to court. These catastrophes expose the stark failure of international legal mechanisms to respond to sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in conflicts (International Criminal Court, 2014) The ongoing circles of war crimes should raise deeply uncomfortable but urgent questions: Why are perpetrators of violence rarely punished? Why do ICC signatory states often fail to intervene? And what role do logics of coloniality play in international law?
Rape is used to kill the will, the spirit, and life itself
Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity are defined as crimes against humanity in the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Article 7, (g)). Despite the legal definition as a crime against humanity, a German NATO General felt comfortable in a meeting in 2025 to state that “if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy”. This might have been formulated allegedly as ‘a joke’, yet it illustrates how conflict-related sexual violence is still normalised in times of war. SGBV is often portrayed as an issue solely for the Global South. However, the list of perpetrators is long including private security firms, militias, secret services but also staff of peacekeeping missions.
The assumption that SGBV is only a matter for the Global South is based on racial hierarchies in International Relations (see Olivia U. Rutazibwa and Toni Haastrup, 2020). To understand the full legal dimension of prosecuting SGBV committed during wars and conflicts, it is key to understand this form of violence as a strategy, not a side effect in conflicts. SGBV is a tactic of dehumanization applied across the globe, and affects all genders of any age:
Gender-based violence targeting masculinity
The Rome Statute refers to war crimes such as torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments (Article 8, (2)(ii)). In Syrian detention centres guards often sexually abused their prisoners to humiliate them, including by threatening to rape the prisoner or family members but also applying forced nudity, electric shocks and burning of genitals. SGBV as crimes against humanity often just come to light when survivors suffer from psychological traumas such as depression, post-traumatic stress, sexual trauma, or paranoid thoughts (Human Rights Watch, 2020). Until today, the full dimension of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) towards men and boys remains extremely underreported as SGBV mostly results in a perceived loss of masculinity (see European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights). In general, government's refusal to grant access to independent investigators and human rights organisations exacerbate the challenge to prosecute these war crimes. For example, Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria created a security apparatus that operates outside the scope of the law which made it extremely hard to even know who the detainees were and where they were kept (Syrian Legal Development Programme, 2024). Cases like these highlight again, that SGBV in conflict is meant to destroy physically and mentally the identified enemy -“they not only raped us, they also raped our land and dignity.”
Reproductive violence as a genocidal tool
The Rome Statute lists genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group: Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group (Article 6 (d)). Reproductive violence in conflicts intends to prevent births within targeted groups by causing severe physical and psychological harm, with some victims dying from injuries or being rendered infertile (UN Women, 2024).
“Reproductive violence can become a genocidal tool when it is systematically used to prevent births within a targeted group or to forcibly alter the group’s demographic composition. When those practices are carried out with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, they meet the threshold of genocide under international law.” (Report of the UN’s Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences, D(48), 2025)
Such violence can include deliberate genital mutilation, enforced sterilization or abortion or gang rape with the aim of humiliating, displacing and ethnically cleansing communities. In the current Sudan war, the strategy involves impregnating survivors to alter ethnic bloodlines, as noted in accounts describing forced pregnancies, to erase the opponent’s identity (Zeinab Mohammed Salih, 2025). Linking reproductive violence with genocidal intent allows an understanding of how conflict parties integrated SGBV fully into their war strategies.
Successful attempts in persecuting crimes against humanity
The Rome Statute of the ICC specifically provides that the Prosecutor shall “take into account the nature of the crime, in particular where it involves sexual violence, gender violence or violence against children” (Article 54). The former ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and the former Special Adviser on Gender Patricia Sellers have shaped the courts SGBV persecution immensely (see Civil Society Open Letter, 2021). Yet, the ICC’s arrest warrants and convictions have repeatedly shown the limits to punish perpetrators of conflict-related sexual violence. Considering the ongoing committed crimes against humanity, it becomes essential to ask: Why are perpetrators of SGBV rarely punished? And what can we learn from previous convictions?
DRC convictions
In 2016, the ICC delivered its first conviction focusing on sexual crimes as both crimes against humanity and war crimes, against Jean-Pierre Bemba, former leader of the Movement for the Liberation of Congo. However, in 2018 Bemba was acquitted from the case for insufficient proofs of his command to his troops during the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). One year later, Bosco Ntaganda, former leader of the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP) was sentenced to 30 years of imprisonment by the ICC, for committing more than 18 crimes of war, including sexual violence. On the one hand, these cases illustrate an important commitment of the court to legally persecute sexual violence as a crime of war. It is worth mentioning that a conviction itself can be evidence of progress in prosecuting sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). On the other hand, these cases illustrate the limitations of evidence collection where a rule-of-law system must allow for acquittals when evidence doesn’t meet legal standards. During conflicts, survivors are fighting for their life on a daily basis and often cannot focus on evidence collection.
Taliban arrest warrants
8 July 2025, the ICC issued arrest warrants for senior Taliban leaders based on ordering, inducing or soliciting crimes against humanity (Article 7(1)(h)). Since the Taliban seized power on 15 August 2021, crimes were committed based on gender grounds against girls, women and other persons non-conforming with the Taliban’s policy on gender, gender identity or expression; and on political grounds against persons perceived as allies of girls and women (ICC, 2025). These warrants are essential to signal that gender-based violence does not go unnoticed in global politics. Yet, whether the arrest warrants will lead to a trial, and justice will be served depends on the willingness of international community to engage. Hence, legal frameworks depend on the cooperation of states, which often limits their ability to act.
Although international legal mechanisms have expanded over the past two decades, including the International Criminal Court and mechanisms of universal jurisdiction, meaningful accountability continues to fall short. This persistent gap raises a fundamental question: Whose justice is being delivered, and whose war crimes are ignored by the international community?
Legal accountability and double standards
In general, criticism of the ICC is a constant. For example, the ICC has faced allegation of being racially biased towards African countries due to high ratio of cases targeting Africa. At the same time, with 33 African States the continent presents the biggest regional block among signatory member states. Burundi withdraw from the Rome Statute emphasizing the ICC’s lack of acknowledging the colonial continuities in conflict zones which are connected to the enduring effects of colonial conquest, extraction, and imposed borders. This falls under the argumentation that geopolitical interests and legal exceptionalism continues to protect perpetrators from accountability and reinforces long-standing imbalances in the global legal order. More recently, European countries have joined criticising the ICC claiming that making the Court’s decisions undermine international law and is a disservice to the Court's credibility. This criticism sparked in 2024, when the ICC’s issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, former Defence Minister Gallant and the now deceased Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif. The repeated failure to prosecute powerful state and non-state actors calls for a critical rethinking of legal accountability, focusing on who justice is designed for, who implements it, and who is ultimately denied it. This excludes Global South legal traditions, survivor-led justice models, or non-Western epistemologies allowing powerful states, such as the US who is not a signatory state, their allies and corporate complicity to evade scrutiny while genocide and ethnic cleansing continues to unfold.
A postcolonial critique not only unpacks how the ICC might be influenced by colonial power relations, but also which states attempt to disrupt logics of coloniality at the ICC. For example, South Africa took the lead in 2023 instituting a case against the state of Israel before the ICJ alleging that the Israeli state is violating its obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention. South Africa’s action has clearly signalled a power shift in a post-colonial world order. States of the Global South have become increasingly willing participants in the project of international criminal justice. 125 countries are States Parties to the Rome Statute of the ICC. In fact, rather than being passive recipients of the legal edifices of international criminal justice, states of the Global South have played an active role in contesting double standards of legal accountability for war crimes, and continue to shape this very architecture in a post-colonial world order.
Further readings:
Fatou Bensouda, International Criminal Court, 2012, Gender Justice and the ICC: Progress and Reflections.
Global Justice Center, 2018, Beyond Killing: Gender, Genocide, and Obligations Under International Law.
Melanie O'Brien & Kathleen M. Maloney, 2025, Gender Justice Denied at the ICC: Problematic Judicial and Prosecutorial Decisions in the Al Hassan Case.
Dr. Miriam Mona Mukalazi is leading the Africa Policy Programme at the Vienna Institute for International Dialogue and Cooperation. Before joining the VIDC, she was a Max Weber Post-Doc Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence where she conducted research on feminist peace and security policies from a postcolonial perspective.
Isabella Monteiro Costa, is enrolled as a master student of Critical Gender Studies at the Central European University in Vienna and an intern at the VIDC in Summer 2025. She is a feminist researcher on migration analysing different forms of gender-based violence.