7 - Lessons Lived in Gender and International Criminal Law
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 March 2021
Summary
Accountability for gender-based crimes has been discussed as an important feature of the Women, Peace and Security agenda. However, too often there has been a significant gap between the ideal of such accountability and its operation. This has been demonstrated over the past decade or so in the operations of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and other tribunals such as those for conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone. In the form of a conversation between Patricia Viseur Sellers, the Special Advisor for Gender for the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and Louise Chappell, Director of the Australian Human Rights Institute at UNSW Sydney and an expert on the ICC, this chapter explores the challenges of, and lessons learned about, achieving accountability for gender crimes through international criminal tribunals, the steps forward towards new accountability practices and strategies and for strengthening the relationship between these tribunals and the broader international WPS agenda.
Louise Chappell (LC): Patricia, can I start by asking what influenced you to enter the field of law, and in particular international criminal law?
Patricia Viseur Sellers (PVS): I went to law school intending to practice criminal law. I attended the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania. After graduation, I joined the Public Defender Office in Philadelphia where I represented indigent defendants who were mainly African American and Latino in criminal proceedings. In addition to defence work, I’d always nurtured an interest in international subjects, whether it was learning languages or travelling outside of the United States. The fact that my father was an officer in the US Army meant that I travelled as a child, spending several years abroad in Germany and living on several army bases within the United States. So I had a conceptualization of the world outside of the United States, along with the breadth of the world inside the United States. For a year during my undergraduate studies at Rutgers, I lived in Mexico and attended the Autonomous University of Mexico. Between undergraduate studies and law school, I moved to Puerto Rico to work on human rights issues.
As an African American growing up in the 1960s and the 1970s, my interest in the law naturally combined with a sense of social justice. The Civil Rights Movement along with other notions of justice and equality permeated our communities, and my family discussions.
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- New Directions in Women, Peace and Security , pp. 111 - 122Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2020