Women's Caucus for Gender Justice's documentary footage for If Hope Were Enough

The Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice grew out of an organizing effort of a small group of women human rights activists from the Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, Costa Rica, Georgia, Germany, India, Japan, the Philippines, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and the United States who attended the February 1997 Preparatory Committee (Prepcom) for the Establishment of an International Criminal Court at the United Nations. By advocating for the codification of sexual, reproductive and gender violence crimes of, as well as for the inclusion of gender sensitive processes and criteria for personnel, the Caucus tried to ensure that the Court would have the capacity to implement justice for women. Some of the issues that the WCGJ sought to address in the ICC Prepcom include the integration of gender in legislation, the gendered nature and limitations of international criminal justice, the services that women need and the mechanisms to meet those needs, and the issues involved with using the western paradigm of women's rights in other countries.

The WCGJ, in association with WITNESS, produced If Hope Were Enough for the purposes of education, advocacy and capacity building as part of the organization's outreach efforts to promote the ICC. Through interviews with survivors of gender-based violence, If Hope Were Enough documents the ways in which women have worked to bring accountability for crimes of sexual and gender violence in conflict and non-conflict situations around the world and the struggles of gender-based violence survivors in Korea, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, Afghanistan and Mexico. The documentary includes archival documentary footage of interviews with “comfort women” in Korea who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Military during World War II. Because gender-based violence was not recognized as a crime against humanity until 1993 this enslavement has gone unpunished. The documentary also includes original interviews with survivors of the massacre in Acteal, a small village in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas. In 1997, a state-funded and state-trained paramilitary group massacred 45 mainly indigenous women and children in Chiapas, Mexico and the perpetrators have not been tried in any court. During the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, accounts of mass rape and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina were brought and tried at an ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal (ICTY) at The Hague in 1993, as were similar accounts at another ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal (ICTR) for the genocide in Rwanda in 1995. The documentary includes archival interviews with survivors of gender-based violence in Bosnia as well as original interviews with advisors and judges at the ICTR.

The Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice is now “Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice.”

References

Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice. "Women's Initiatives for Gender Justice: History," http://www.iccwomen.org/aboutus/history.php (accessed November 14, 2012)

Women's Caucus for Gender Justice. "Women's Caucus for Gender Justice: About the Women's Caucus," http://www.iccwomen.org/wigjdraft1/Archives/oldWCGJ/aboutcaucus.html (accessed November 14, 2012)