Too often, the concept of ‘gender crimes’ is understood as being synonymous with sexual crimes or crimes against women. This training session will address the relationship between sexual violence and gender-based violence, and will highlighted the gendered aspects of other international crimes such as genocide, enslavement, torture and persecution. In addition, it will examine how acts of sexual and gender-based violence against both men and women have been addressed by international criminal law, and will critically analyse the legal, institutional and evidentiary obstacles which have led to such crimes historically being minimized or overlooked.

From January to December 2017, Niamh Hayes was seconded by UN Women as an expert advisor on gender, working in the Investigative Analysis Section of the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. She will shortly take up a position as a Legal Officer in the Gender and Children Unit of the Office of the Prosecutor and is about to complete her doctoral research on the investigation and prosecution of sexual violence by international criminal tribunals as a Ph.D. student at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland Galway. Ms Hayes has written numerous academic publications on sexual violence as an international crime. From 2012 to 2016 she was the Head of Office and SGBV expert for the Institute for International Criminal Investigations, and participated in specialist professional SGBV trainings on four continents. She has worked with UN Women, the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, the ICTR and the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office on training and best practices projects relating to the investigation and documentation of conflict-related sexual violence. In 2016 she acted as a legal consultant for a research project conducted by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) on increasing accountability for sexual and gender-based crimes at the ICC and in other jurisdictions. She has lectured on international criminal law at Trinity College Dublin and Leiden University, monitored ICC trial developments as a legal consultant for Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice and worked as a defence intern on the Karadžić trial at the ICTY.