Widespread and systematic rape pervaded both the genocides in BosniaHerzegovina in 1992 and in Rwanda in 1994. In response to these conflicts, the Yugoslav Tribunal (ICTY) and the Rwandan Tribunal (ICTR) were created and charged with meting justice for crimes committed, including rape. Nevertheless, the two tribunals differ in their relative success in administering justice for crimes of rape. Addressing rape has been a consistent element of the ICTY prosecution strategy, which resulted in gender-sensitive investigative procedures, higher frequencies of rape indictments, and more successful prosecutions. In contrast, rape has not been a central focus of the ICTR prosecution strategy, which resulted in a sporadic approach to gender-sensitive investigative procedures, inconsistent rape indictments, and few successful prosecutions. What accounts for this disparity in rape prosecutions between the Rwandan and Yugoslav tribunals? Building off the existing literature that discusses factors such as legal instruments and resource capacity of the tribunal, this article argues that transnational advocacy helped generate the necessary political will to adopt and implement legal norms regarding crimes of sexual violence at the ICTY and the ICTR. Following the importance of transnational advocacy as agents of norm change, this paper also explores the antecedent conditions of advocacy mobilization that conditioned different levels of mobilization vis-à-vis the ICTY and the ICTR, including media attention and framing, connections and interest match with local groups, and geopolitical context.
International human rights law is most efficacious when it is both incorporated into domestic law and translated into local contexts. Yet, cities as independent implementers of unratified international law have received limited scholarly attention. This article examines such renegade municipal localization of international law through an analysis of San Francisco and Los Angeles’s binding ordinances implementing the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) – a treaty to which the United States in not a party. The analysis demonstrates that municipal ordinances in US charter cities are robust legal mechanisms that can help actualize human rights in large urban populations, despite national inaction. Nonetheless, municipal localization of unratified international law – in both the content of the ordinances and their implementation over time – is driven predominantly by local context and city politics rather than conformity to the international treaty on which the ordinances are based. While this importantly demonstrates that unratified international law can be made relevant to cities, the insularity of local ordinances can also result in limited accountability for non-implementation and the ordinances evolving apart from international treaty developments.
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