The Gender Jurisprudence and International Criminal Law Project is a collaborative project between the War Crimes Research Office (WCRO) and the Women and International Law Program (WILP) at American University Washington College of Law. Launched with support from the Open Society Institute’s International Women’s Program, the project aims to raise awareness of and encourage research and debate about the jurisprudence emerging from international and hybrid tribunals regarding sexual and gender-based violence committed during times of conflict, mass violence, or repression and to facilitate the investigation and prosecution of these crimes under international law.
The centerpiece of the website is the Gender Jurisprudence Collections (GJC), a powerful database containing more than 26,000 documents, including judgments, decisions, and orders issued by international/ized criminal courts and tribunals, and made easily searchable for issues relating to sexual and gender-based violence. Unlike online searches that can generate hundreds of irrelevant decisions, the GJC includes close to 1,700 documents that have been identified as containing gender issues and coded for key concepts, eliminating researchers’ need to sift through extraneous documents.
In addition to the GJC, the Project includes concise digests of select decisions and court documents highlighting key facts, allegations, and legal analyses dealing with sexual and gender-based violence, allowing researchers to quickly home in on content that is most significant.
The site also includes commentaries on select issues or cases critical to understanding developments in this area of the law by academics, practitioners, judges, prosecutors, and legal scholars with particular expertise in the investigation and prosecution of sexual and gender-based violence.
In addition, the site’s blog offers a dynamic space for the international law community to engage in honest, insightful, and grounded discussions of ideas, programs, data, laws, and policies about current feminist debates within the field of international criminal law.