International judicial institutions have shepherded in a “coming of age” of sexual violence prosecutions under international criminal law and humanitarian law. The task is promising yet tenuous: It requires vision and vigilance. The chapters in this book deliver both prerequisites by their articulation of tools to fortify enforcement of international criminal law's safeguards against sexual violence.

Enforcement is complex and entails more than well intended drafting of express legal provisions into a statute or convention. Edicts banning wartime sexual assaults were inserted into ancient warrior codes. International conventions, such as the 1929 Geneva Convention prohibited infliction of sexual assaults upon female and male prisoners of war. In the immediate aftermath of the World War II, martial law decrees such as Control Council No. 10 explicitly proscribed rapes as acts of crimes against humanity. Indeed, the Nuremberg and Tokyo international military tribunals investigated, prosecuted and handed down convictions for war crimes based upon sexual violence. Still, these precedents heralded no manifest undertaking of sexual violence prosecutions as international crimes in national courts and, along with other illicit conduct endured the dearth of adjudications at the international level. Derelict attention, unapologetic impunity and ignored or misconstrued jurisprudence openly paraded the inability to enforce prohibitions of sexual violence under international law.

During the past two decades, in a welcomed realignment of intent, the international community directed concerted scrutiny at the pervasiveness of impunity for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. International and internationalized judicial institutions emerged to respond to the calls for enforcement and to conduct the tripartite process of investigations, prosecution and adjudications of international crimes. Whether generated by Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, by a United Nations agreement or by the multilateral consensus of a treaty, the responsibility of most of these judicial institutions was to redress the heretofore pithy enforcement of wartime prohibitions and acts of crimes against humanity or genocide related to specific geographical and time bound situations, with the exception of the International Criminal Court that will exercise prospective jurisdiction.