The Budapest Centre for Mass Atrocities Prevention, in co-operation with the European Centre for the Responsibility To Protect and the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, is organising a roundtable on ‘Gender-Based Mass Atrocity Prevention’ as a pre-event of the 10th Budapest Human Rights Forum.

Until recently the human rights of women, have been marginalised from the mainstream human rights discourse. This is largely because women have been excluded from both the substance and the process of international human rights law. Issues concerning their rights were mainly considered to belong to the private sphere and their violation was often defended in the name of culture.

The Report of UN Secretary General on R2P in 2013 notes that “gender discrimination and inequality increase the underlying risks associated with sexual and gender-based violence” and highlighted the nexus between gender and mass atrocity crimes. The UN Framework of Analysis for the Prevention of Atrocity Crimes stresses the need to dedicate specific attention to ‘acts of violence against women and children, or creation of conditions that facilitate acts of sexual violence against those groups’ and integrates gender in the early warning analysis of situations at risk. The UN Resolution 2171/2014 acknowledges that gender-based violence can be ‘an early indication of a descent into conflict or escalation of conflict’.

The jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda determined for the first time that rape can in itself constitute a form of genocide. The judges of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia have noted that rape can also be legally designated as both war crime and crime against humanity. Many forms of gender-based violence, such as rape, genital harm, and sex-selective killings are parts of mass
atrocity crimes.

In the light of the increasing acknowledgement of gender-based violence as an especially prevalent feature of mass atrocity crimes, and the ongoing sexual violence in several countries including Syria, it is imperative to highlight the specific legal, political, and practical challenges posed by ’rape as a weapon of war.’ By combining practitioner and scholarly perspectives, feasible prevention options need to be discussed.

The Budapest Centre for Mass Atrocity Prevention has implemented pre-events to the Budapest Human Rights Forum organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Hungary for the last nine years.