GENDER BASED CRIMES AND THE ARAB SPRING
Over the past eleven years, several Arab countries in the Middle East, mainly Syria, Egypt, and Libya, have witnessed major upheaval leading to protests against authoritarian regimes, known worldwide as the revolutions of the Arab Spring. While the human tolls from the bloody responses have echoed internationally, these events have also witnessed massive gender-based crimes, including systematic rape in homes, detention facilities, public checkpoints, and interrogation centres. These horrific crimes, committed mainly by members of the police forces, intelligence officers, interrogators and prison guards, include forced nudity, virginity testing, and sexual torture. To exert severe suffering on the victims, women and men were often assaulted in front of their family members to humiliate them and tear the fabric of their mainly conservative societies. That being said, while reports documenting these regimes’ crimes against defenceless civilians were reported early on, these atrocities have been met with indifference at both the domestic and international judicial levels, amplifying the suffering of victims and encouraging the prevalent culture of impunity.
In fact, conflict-related gender-based crimes, including rape and other forms of sexual violence, were endemic in the Arab-Spring movements, mainly perpetrated by government officials and paramilitaries and, to a lesser extent, by various insurgent groups. Both women and men were subjected to horrendous forms of conflict-related sexual violence, including severe invasions of their bodies. Abuses in Libya and Syria that emerged in the ongoing conflicts from 2011 ranged from verbal abuse, forced nudity in public, invasive and punitive virginity tests to gang-rape, and other unprecedented gender-related crimes. Virginity testing, for example, is a form of gender-based violence, discrimination, and sexual humiliation conducted on young Egyptian women activists in Tahrir Square after the January 25th, 2011 revolution.
THE NEED FOR A PEOPLE’S TRIBUNAL
My recently published scholarly work on this issue, entitled: Reining in Impunity: A People’s Tribunal for the Arab-Spring Gender-Based Crimes, emphasises the necessity of establishing a people’s tribunal to investigate gender-based crimes allegedly committed during the Arab Spring, to assist the victims, and to indict the perpetrators as a step to bring them to justice. It argues that the international community’s lack of political will, manifested in its failure to respond adequately to these heinous crimes and bring perpetrators to justice through international judicial bodies, impedes access to justice for victims, encourages the culture of impunity, and leaves the war-torn Arab countries’ peace-building process open to the danger of collapse, particularly in Libya and Syria.
The study has two objectives. First, it examines the feasibility of establishing a women’s tribunal as an informal people’s mechanism to bring justice for victims away from formal state judicial institutions. Secondly, it determines whether this tribunal could be seen as an alternative avenue for gender justice and accountability. To do so, it begins by considering the people’s tribunals’ evolution as a civil society mechanism to deal with the above crimes. It then underlines different patterns of conflict-related gender-based crimes, and the so-called jihād al-nikāh ‘sexual jihad marriage’. The inquiry also explores barriers to justice that deny victims their rights to seek justice, which has exacerbated the already pervasive culture of impunity. Examples of barriers include the victims’ fear of reprisals or retaliation by perpetrators, limited financial resources, stigmatisation and vulnerability to others, corruption of the judicial system, fear of being killed, or abandoned and socially rejected. Moreover, It reviews these barriers within the socio-political and judicial contexts and brings to light the disastrous impact of this denial on victims and their societies.
Furthermore, the study critically investigates the people’s tribunals’ significance as an informal alternative mechanism to address the Arab-Spring gender-based violence victims’ and survivors’ needs. It underlines the role of the people’s tribunal in collecting evidence, encouraging victims to seek justice, putting an end to the punishment of victims, reconsidering the traditional concept of shame, considering the socio-pedagogical influence of the women tribunals’ trials, breaking the cycle of impunity, pressuring the concerned governments to take legal responsibility, and pointing out the ineffectiveness of the international criminal justice system due to its complementary regime. Finally, the study concludes by elucidating the above overlapping themes’ findings and answers the legitimate question of whether initiation of a people’s tribunal is timely and imperative to serve as an informal mechanism and alternative avenue to deliver gender justice to victims and survivors of the Arab-Spring gender-based violence.
The piece further invites human rights organisations concerned with women’s rights and documented gender-based crimes perpetrated during the Arab-Spring to take the initiative in establishing a people’s tribunal to prosecute the perpetrators of these heinous crimes. Germany or the United Kingdom may be suitable homes for the tribunal, especially since on the one hand they host many refugees, and therefore also potential victims, and on the other, because they are the closest geographically among the free world countries to where these crimes have been perpetrated.
Zawati is an international criminal law jurist. He has an accomplished body of trans-disciplinary scholarship and is the author of several prize-winning books, including ‘Fair Labelling and the Dilemma of Prosecuting Gender-Based Crimes’ (Oxford, 2014).