(Photo credit: Alexandra Lily Kather)
On Monday 3 February 2025, the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law (LCIL), with the support of the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies, is organising the panel '(Non-)Defining 'Gender' in the Crimes Against Humanity Draft: Possibilities, Alliances, and Strategies'. This roundtable event will bring together scholars and activists working on the definition of gender in international criminal law, in an effort to learn from their specific positionalities, perceptions, and experiences about the challenges, strategies, and possibilities for (non-) defining the term.
Feminist activists, country representatives, and other civil society actors have debated how to define “gender” in international criminal law (ICL) for at least three decades. In the Rome Conference that established the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its Statute in 1998, defining “gender” was a hotly debated topic of negotiation. More recently, this debate has resurfaced in the steps leading to the International Law Commission’s Draft Articles for a Crimes Against Humanity Treaty, and continues to be discussed in the deliberations at the Sixth Committee on the Draft Articles. The CAH Convention is now expected to be negotiated between 2026-2029, and, more than a mere point of contention, the concept of ‘gender’ in its text can be crucial for prosecuting sexual and gender-based international crimes and thus fundamental to gender justice efforts worldwide.
Speakers:
Akila Radhakrishnan (Atlantic Council)
Alexandra Lily Kather (Emergent Justice Collective)
Dr Rosemary Grey (Sydney Law School)
Professor Valerie Oosterveld (Faculty of Law, Western University)
Moderators:
Dr Juliana Santos de Carvalho (LCIL Fellow and INT ACDF Fellow, University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies)
Dr Lena Holzer (LCIL Fellow and Assistant Professor in Gender, Race and the Law in the Law Faculty, University of Cambridge)
Monday, 3 February 2025 - 10.00am
Location:
Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, Berkowitz/Finley Lecture Hall
The event will be hybrid, and registration is required.