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Remarks by Christine Ryan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2023

Christine Ryan
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Extract

Thanks. When I first received the invitation to speak on this panel and saw the cover of the Queering Atrocity Prevention report, and also considered the work that was done by OutRight and Human Rights Watch in the Afghanistan report, there were many things that excited me about this work, despite its horrendous content. I am going to talk about two in particular. The first is something that is a call or reaffirmation that I see in both papers for our legal policy and programmatic approaches, to take a more critical queer and feminist conception of gender and apply that to whether it is our frameworks of analysis or to the legal obligations that exist for states to prevent and to punish mass atrocities. This, of course, goes beyond just the adding in of LGBT people or, as has happened over the past twenty years, just adding women into our international frameworks or our policy frameworks as well, but really understanding how gender as a social and relational dynamic, how that impacts behavior and expectations of behavior, how that can drive human rights abuses, how it can drive atrocities, how it is the root cause of them in many cases, and how we need to consider how different policies impact differently gendered beings at the response stage as well. That was one of the first things that I am hoping that this paper brings, that it resurges this conversation as much as possible, whether it is scholarship or within the diplomatic community, where I was partly involved in my last work, and to see it become more widespread.

Type
Queering Atrocity Prevention
Information
Proceedings of the ASIL Annual Meeting , Volume 116 , 2022 , pp. 107 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The American Society of International Law

Thanks. When I first received the invitation to speak on this panel and saw the cover of the Queering Atrocity Prevention report, and also considered the work that was done by OutRight and Human Rights Watch in the Afghanistan report, there were many things that excited me about this work, despite its horrendous content. I am going to talk about two in particular. The first is something that is a call or reaffirmation that I see in both papers for our legal policy and programmatic approaches, to take a more critical queer and feminist conception of gender and apply that to whether it is our frameworks of analysis or to the legal obligations that exist for states to prevent and to punish mass atrocities. This, of course, goes beyond just the adding in of LGBT people or, as has happened over the past twenty years, just adding women into our international frameworks or our policy frameworks as well, but really understanding how gender as a social and relational dynamic, how that impacts behavior and expectations of behavior, how that can drive human rights abuses, how it can drive atrocities, how it is the root cause of them in many cases, and how we need to consider how different policies impact differently gendered beings at the response stage as well. That was one of the first things that I am hoping that this paper brings, that it resurges this conversation as much as possible, whether it is scholarship or within the diplomatic community, where I was partly involved in my last work, and to see it become more widespread.

Thinking about that in terms of the R2P lens and international law lens, I think that as Neela spoke, we had a good snapshot of what a queer lens can offer in documentation, in being prepared to do documentation, and what is necessary in advance in terms of the networks and relationships. In my work now, we think about what happens and whether or not there is enough international attention and judicial attention to the abuses suffered by women and LGBT people, whether that is the lack of prosecutions for sexual and gender-based violence or understanding how differently gendered beings experience other abuses, whether it is starvation, forced displacement, and mass detention or arbitrary detention and the different impacts for LGBT and women.

To echo Jean, we have Lisa Davis in the audience who has rightly pointed out in much of her work that it is also that this critical gender lens is not just about showing what happens to people but why it happens and what is at the root of it—whether it is mass violence or other atrocities and understanding the anti-rights gender ideology that motivates perpetrators and commanders and why we need to consider both, whether it is in the doctrine and jurisprudence coming from the International Criminal Court or in international humanitarian law or international human rights law. If we are ever to really consider the duty to prevent and to punish, we need to understand the root causes.

The second reason that I was particularly excited by the title of this paper was thinking about what we can learn from it and what challenges it poses to us more broadly to queer something like atrocity prevention, which has often been dominated by a security lens. More broadly than that, thinking about when feminists were engaging with international law and being heard for the first time, a very astute analysis was that feminists seemed to be caught in the tension of resistance and compliance.

While feminists pushed for ostensibly structural change within international human rights, all frameworks and international frameworks more broadly, they were ultimately working within a patriarchal, heteronormative system, and the tensions that arise there. I am excited for us to talk about more and to hear from others about how much of that you see as a challenge in your work and possibly does it lead us to think more about what accountability can look like or how different groups engage with the Security Council—what demands we make of those at the Security Council, possibly in terms of discernment or in terms of what it looks like to refer something to the ICC and what type and how that serves local populations or whether we look more at distributive justice or retributive justice and local forms of justice.

I like to think that can be part of the conversation too. I want to congratulate Protection Approaches for this new ideas paper and to thank OutRight and Human Rights Watch for their longstanding commitment to documentation work and to raising visibility to the human rights abuses suffered by LGBT populations. Thank you.