After the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the United Nations Security Council moved quickly to establish an international tribunal to indict the architects of the slaughter. Whether motivated by a sincere desire for international justice or a self-serving desire to assuage international guilt for the lack of significant military intervention, one thing is clear: the Security Council began a program that, when coupled with its establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, represented the most significant return to international criminal justice since the Allied prosecution of German war criminals at Nuremberg. But so much had changed since 1951. Whereas the Nuremberg Tribunal imposed death sentences for the most culpable instigators of the Holocaust, there would be no death sentences for the architects of the Hutu genocidal campaign against the Tutsi. Over the course of forty years, there was a sea shift in attitudes about the legality of the death penalty. When the Allies announced their decision to apply the death penalty at Nuremberg, few objected or suggested that executions would violate international human rights law. Indeed, Churchill was initially suspicious of the plan for a war crimes tribunal, having assumed that what remained of the Nazi leadership would simply be executed on the battlefield. As the proceedings unfolded, there were isolated calls for leniency and clemency, and even complaints of victors’ justice, but certainly no suggestion that executions violated international law as such.

Today many feminists seem relatively content with the treatment of rape and other sexual violence against women under international criminal law. In the context of the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s, feminist activists made a concerted effort to affect the statute establishing the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the rules of evidence under which rape and other crimes of sexual violence would be prosecuted, the form the indictments of crimes of sexual violence would take, and the strategies and legal argumentation made at both the trial and the appellate levels. For the most part, much to the surprise of many feminists themselves, they have been successful. As Joanne Barkan comments: “From the start, most observers considered the [ICTY] a sop to human rights and feminist activists who wanted intervention.... Almost no one expected it to succeed. And yet to some extent, at least for women, it did.”