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This chapter discusses the challenges faced by the criminal tribunals regarding their statutory laws and procedures. It presents a wide array of forms of deliberate inappreciation of legal practitioners to prosecuting rape and gender-based cases. In addition, this chapter provides an exposition on the infringement of rights of the accused due to ambiguity and lack of prosecutorial strategy.

This concluding chapter summarizes the intentions of the author to present an in-depth case study featuring war-time gender-based crimes during the onset of wars in the nations of former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone. It provides a summary of findings about the revolutionary efforts of the international criminal tribunals and feminist legal activists for a firmer international criminal justice. In addition, it describes the role of the principle of fair-labelling and other compelling legal concepts in providing a legalistic approach to the discourse.

This chapter examines the historical invisibility of gender-based crimes in the international humanitarian instruments and international criminal tribunal's case law. It presents the roles played by the feminist legal scholars in introducing gender-based crimes to the scrutiny of the world through their diverse views and arguments regarding the matter. In addition, the chapter describes the heinous misfortunes of Bosnian Muslim and Croatian victims under the tyranny of the Serb men.

This chapter explains the failures of the international criminal tribunals to address the issues of rape, sexual slavery, and all other forms of sexual violence due to lack of a central definition for the offence, non-codification of the offence, and conflicting rules of law of the criminal tribunals of Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone. It provides a thorough analysis of different legal scholars from which a landmark definition of rape is derived.

The figure of the victim is the sine qua non of the fight against impunity for international crimes. Engaging the victimological imagination of international criminal justice, the chapter shows how victims are represented, and how justice for victims is imagined. The first part focuses on imaginations of ‘justice for victims’, and argues that the ICC represents a form of hybrid justice by incorporating ‘restorative’ and ‘transformative’ rationales for justice. Unlike ordinary courts, the ICC incorporates what can be thought of as both ‘punitive’ and ‘reparative’ arms. Part of the latter is the Rome Statute’s provisions for victims’ rights to participation and reparation. However, a closer look at the implementation of these processes reveal a conspicuous discrepancy between ideologies and realities. The second part of the chapter situates victims as a source of moral authority, and one that is claimed in representational practices by both human rights NGOs and international criminal justice generally. The chapter explores suffering as a type of ‘currency’, both on an individual level for victims’ advocates, as their source of ‘purpose’, and on a broader cultural level as the source of ‘global’ moral outcry. The chapter demonstrates how the victim is culturally represented through imaginations from the global North and becomes universalized as a symbol of humanity, of which the gendered and racialized victim of sexual and gender-based violence provides particularly powerful victim imagery. In this way, the image of the victim of international crimes is characterized by her essential ‘otherness’: it is humanity that suffers.