Sexual violence as torture

Sexual violence as torture 

Rape was not conceptualized as torture until the Celebici judgement delivered by the ICTY in November 1998.¹⁰ One of the four accused, Hazim Delic, a Bosnian Muslim deputy camp commander at the Celebici prison camp, was found guilty of torture as a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions and as a violation of the laws and customs of war (war crimes) for the rapes he committed against two Bosnian Serb women held prisoner at the camp in 1992. 

The Trial Chamber found that there was no question that acts of rape could constitute torture under international law. The Trial Chamber emphasized that rape and sexual violence inflicts the severe physical and psychological pain and suffering that characterizes torture. One of the required elements of the crime of torture is that the act must be inflicted for a designated 'purpose'. The Trial Chamber accepted that the required purpose can include: 'obtaining information or a confession from the victim, or a third person, punishing the victim for an act he or she or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, intimidating or coercing the victim or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind'.¹¹ Violence directed against a woman because she is a woman, is a form of discrimination. The Trial Chamber emphasized that when such violence is committed against a woman because she is a woman, in addition to rape because of a woman's ethnicity, then the prohibited 'purpose' of gender discrimination is triggered.¹² Sexual violence has been recognized as torture in other ICTY cases.¹³