Insufficient legal protection and access to justice for post-conflict sexual violence

Taking the Crimes against Humanity (CAH) initiative as a point of departure, this article discusses the normative weaknesses in the international legal rules protecting against sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV)1 against women under and after armed conflict, and identifies the legal lacunae, systemic deficiencies and its consequences for the protection against and prevention of post-conflict SGBV. The main argument constitutes a critique against the gendered construction of the definition of CAH that disregards the transgression of the public /private divide in the special instruments for the regulation of women's human rights developed in the 1990s.