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Gender Mainstreaming in International Institutions: developments at the UN ad hoc
tribunals and the International Criminal Court
Louise Chappell
ABSTRACT
Gender mainstreaming has been used as a tool by gender equality advocates in their attempt to
make international legal institutions more attentive the concerns as women as well as men.
Specifically, activists have worked through the ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and
Rwanda as well as the International Criminal Court to challenge the traditional understanding of
women and their interests under international law, where women have tended to be defined
through their relationships with either men or with children and where gender-based crimes have
been categorised as less egregious than those experienced by men. This paper looks at the efforts
to entrench a gender mainstreaming approach to equality within these international legal
institutions and assesses the success of the strategy in terms of the treatment and understanding of
women victims of violence and conflict by these institutions.
It argues that despite some
limitations, these efforts have been largely successful, and provides three hypotheses for why this
is the case. First, that the ‘newness’ of these institutions has made a difference to opening
opportunities for gender advocates. Second, that gender advocates both inside and outside
reinforced each others efforts to ensure that women’s access to justice has been placed (and
remained) on the agenda. Finally, and most speculatively, that the nature of legal institutions
make them more amenable than others, especially government bureaucracies, to the acceptance
of new norms, such as those concerning gender justice. Despite the relative success of the gender
mainstreaming strategy, the paper concludes cautiously. It suggests that in light of recent strong
opposition to gender equality in the international realm, vigilance is needed to maintain these
developments and also that it cannot be presumed that a greater sensitivity to gender issues can
never be viewed as stable or permanent.
Traditionally, international law, including its humanitarian element, has operated along a strict
gender code. Not only has it created norms and institutions which treat men and women who
experience the same crimes differently, but it has also failed to address the different ways men
and women experience acts of violence and conflict. Until very recently, it has overwhelmingly
been the case that it is men who have been used as the standard for international humanitarian
law. With the advent in the 1990s and the new millennium of new institutions to address
humanitarian law, including the UN ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda (ICTR)
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