16 Days Activism Against GBV Series | Effective Gender Justice as a Pathway to Peace

This blog post is based on the keynote speech delivered by Michelle Jarvis at the Gender Justice in International Criminal Law Conference, held on 29–30 September 2025 in The Hague, the Netherlands. The event was organized in partnership with the Gender Justice Practitioner Hub, Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice, Legal Action Worldwide, the Legal Mobilization Platform and the International Institute of Social Studies.

In this blog, Jarvis emphasizes that achieving true gender justice in international criminal law requires transforming not only the outcomes of justice processes but also the deep gender structures that operate both within societies and within the institutions responsible for delivering justice. The views expressed are Jarvis’ personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IIIM-Syria or the United Nations.

 

Between 2023 and 2024, I followed the scoping phase for the Gender Justice Practitioner (GJP) Hub – funded by the Australian Government and implemented by Legal Action Worldwide. It was an unprecedented opportunity to consult practitioners around the world working on accountability for international crimes. Over 18 months, nine regional roundtables and dozens of expert interviews, we reached more than 800 practitioners. We asked some pressing questions about the blockages they face, what would help them the most and how we, as a field of practice, can strengthen overall gender justice outcomes.

One thing was seared on my mind from the discussions: the hunger across our field of practice for connection, solidarity and support – within and across, the national, regional and international levels.

As a practitioner working on accountability mandates over the past 25 years, I knew from my own experience the sense of disconnection inside our individual institutions, due in part to the ad hoc nature of this work. But I was stunned by the depth of the sentiment expressed about the emotional toll on practitioners and our collective alarm over hard-fought gains being eroded in a heartbeat.

Now we find ourselves here, in September 2025, in a world riddled with escalating attacks on the very principle of gender equality, unabashed efforts to dominate people and populations and unprecedented pressure on our ever-more fragile institutions. Still, we have to be honest about the historical shortcomings embedded in our institutions – from a gender perspective and from many other perspectives as well. But, after-all, the cracks are where the light gets in. We can choose to see this as a time of opportunity.

Three key considerations may guide us to move in this direction. The first thing is getting clarity on the vision of the world we want to see. Daring to speak it out loud – if we can do so safely. And when that is not possible, finding other ways to direct our energy to it. Creating a collective narrative that can help us shape our reality. We need a new imagining of humanity, to counter the mounting and alarmingly effective narratives of domination, separation, division and greed.

And perhaps we need to go back to basics. The vision of the world that I would like to see can be very simply stated: peaceful, flourishing communities, living within planetary environmental boundaries. Surely that is at least a starting point we can all agree on?

But how do we move in that direction?  For me, one urgent piece of the puzzle is repairing and rebuilding communities torn apart by conflict-related atrocities. I have spent most of my career grappling with the role that justice plays in this process.

Of course, if we achieve this vision of peaceful, flourishing communities, there will be no more atrocities and no need for justice processes to address them. Perhaps we should dare to set a bold target as part of our vision – ‘in 20 years’ time, justice processes for atrocity crimes will be obsolete’.

If we were to take up a challenge like that for atrocity crimes, we have some deep thinking to do about what our justice processes need to deliver to truly help repair and rebuild communities. We say ‘no peace without justice’. But what kind of justice? We need justice processes that expose and condemn the structural drivers of atrocity crimes, to help us dismantle them.

We see flecks of this thinking embedded in the design of our international criminal law frameworks. Some provisions were specifically developed to expose certain discriminatory drivers of crimes, such as race, ethnicity, nationality, politics and religion. However, gendered structures have not, historically, been recognised. Although we have made some progress with the Rome Statute’s recognition of gender persecution, we have been very slow to apply this provision and, so far, the results are sparse.

Overall, we have struggled to address the structural elements of gender in international criminal law, despite their pervasive role in driving crimes; exacerbating the impact of conflict-related harms; and then silencing the voices of victims and survivors and blocking their access to justice.

Our focus has largely been confined to addressing some of the gendered consequences of conflict, particularly conflict-related sexual violence. We have not really begun to grapple with the structural underpinnings of that violence. Until we do, our justice processes will be a blunt instrument in our toolkit for repairing and rebuilding communities in the aftermath of atrocities. That link between addressing gendered structures in accountability processes and the quest for a more peaceful and flourishing world, needs much more attention. While the gendered drivers of atrocities are not homogenous and static, there are some patterns and we can do better in developing baseline methodologies to tailor for specific contexts. This is something the Hub has on its priority list.

This brings me to the second issue – the need to address the deep gender structures inside our own institutions. Based on the 25 years that I have worked inside international institutions with accountability mandates, one thing is clear: we cannot promote inclusive gender justice without institutions that have a commitment to gender equality embedded in their DNA. We should reject the idea of justice processes that serve only a fraction of the affected community and commit to addressing the imbalance as a core part of our work. To support this, we need institutions that also embody a commitment to gender equality.

This was one of the key insights coming out of the extensive review we did at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which was published as Prosecuting Conflict-Related Sexual Violence at the ICTY. However, since then, we have seen little evidence of meaningful engagement with this challenge. We have seen a flurry of policy frameworks – which is important – but few signs of sustained engagement with the ‘deep structures’ inside our institutions. As a result, we presently have a gulf between our policy frameworks, their implementation in practice and the strengthened gender justice outcomes that we are seeking.

Having worked on this challenge now for many years, I am the first to acknowledge that progress is not easy – and this challenge is not for the faint hearted!

Our institutional systems are highly complex and the deep discriminatory structures embedded in them are very good at re-asserting themselves when challenged. As I watched this process unfold in real time, it sent me scurrying for research that would help me understand the systemic factors at play. What had others experienced and written on this? Joanne Sandler and, in particular, her co-authored book Gender at Work  was pivotal in helping me to recognize and articulate what I was seeing up close. The book emphasizes the importance of grappling with the ‘deep gender structures’ inside our institutions: ‘gender policies rarely take on deep structures due to their pervasiveness and the takes time to confront them’ and, I would add, the difficulty of even getting visibility on how they are operating. But we certainly feel them and sometimes hear fragments of them articulated inside our institutions through comments like: ‘We are spending too many resources on gender’; ‘By focusing on crimes experienced by women, we could be seen as biased. It is incompatible with being evidence driven’; and ‘Why does it matter if we have low figures of women as witnesses – that has no impact on the verdicts’.

We need open and honest discussions about these types of concerns. Cultures of silence are one of the most insidious forms of reinforcing biased structures. But how do we know what is a valid concern and what is the discriminatory system re-asserting itself? A good litmus test is the constructiveness with which the concerns are raised and whether the overall trend inside our institutions is to block, or gut, any progress on gender equality.

Inevitably, when entrenched biased structures are challenged, there will be backlash. If we are not experiencing backlash from the implementation of our gender policies, then we have not yet begun to fundamentally change the way that our institutions are functioning. Fiona Mackay  sums it up well:

‘We should celebrate as a success cases where the status quo has to…work hard to reproduce itself and has to invest resources and energy in resisting gender change. The need for visible resistance to positive change is a success.’

Along the way, we need to create a better culture of care around the change agents inside our institutions. As we heard during the scoping phase of the Hub, it is tough out there! And in the words of Sandler et al. ‘Personal and professional attacks pile up, especially when success is achieved.’

One of our most significant strategies to date has been the short-term deployment of gender experts to work with accountability mechanisms. This has been an important development to address historical silences. However, we should not view this as a stand-alone strategy. Individuals parachuted into an organization, especially for a short period of time, cannot, alone, tackle the gendered structures that block gender justice both within the communities we serve and inside our own institutions. We also have to be realistic about the pattern of pushback that change agents are likely to experience and be well prepared to support them through the process as a standard part of our strategy.

These systemic issues are focus areas for the Hub. Encouragingly, the Hub has started to receive requests for assistance by some institutional actors now seeking to engage with the challenge, but we can get even more ambitious. It would be great to see all leaders of accountability institutions engaging with the Hub on a collaborative project to strengthen efforts on gender sensitive institution building, starting with those who have already signed up as Gender Champions.

The third issue I want to cover, is the alchemy we could release through better coordination among ourselves as gender justice actors. This aspiration has also been embedded in the vision for the Hub.

We know we need to move outside of our echo chamber. Bringing in all generations to the conversation is an important component of this and sparks genuine optimism that it is possible to achieve the systems change we seek.

Better cross-disciplinary coordination is also key, starting with the silos that currently exist between academia and practitioners. There is so much good work being done within the academic realm, but practitioners rarely have time to follow the developing literature, and often it is too theoretical to be directly translated into practice. It makes a difference when academics working on gender and International Criminal Law issues engage with practitioners and help us translate their insights into practical approaches for our work – and I’m personally grateful to scholars like Judith Gardam, Kirsten Campbell, Gorana Mlinarevic, Susana SáCouto and Lisa Davis.

To conclude, let us return for a moment to the vision I mentioned: peaceful, flourishing communities; effective gender justice to help us repair and rebuild communities torn apart by atrocities; and ultimately, rendering justice processes obsolete.

What would it look like if we threw our collective global might behind this challenge?

Definitely we have some work to do. Even if it feels overwhelming to see how comprehensive change could be achieved, perhaps we can start with focusing on some islands of change.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the authors:

Michelle Jarvis has worked in the international criminal justice field for 25 years and took up the role of the Deputy Head of the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism (Syria) (IIIM) in December 2017. Prior to that she was the Deputy to the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT). Michelle’s work has focused on bringing accountability to victims/survivors of crimes in the Balkans, Rwanda and Syria, as well as building capacity for accountability processes in many other conflict and post conflict areas. Michelle has worked extensively to promote inclusive, innovative and agile approaches to accountability for core international crimes (war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide), including bringing visibility to the experiences of marginalized groups during accountability processes and strengthening legal responses. She has co-authored two books and numerous articles on the subject of gender and armed conflict. She has initiated an innovative project, supported by the Australian Government, to establish an international Gender Justice Practitioner Hub to promote improved gender justice outcomes globally. Prior to her work in international criminal law, Michelle was a litigator in Australia, where her roles included improving women’s access to justice. Michelle holds a master’s degree in law from the University of Toronto as well as degrees in law and economics from the University of Adelaide.

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