Sex on the Bench: Do Women Judges Matter to the Legitimacy of International Courts?

This chapter analyses the descriptive, symbolic, and substantive representation of women judges in international courts and tribunals. The last couple of years have witnessed slow progress in the quest to achieve sex balanced or gender parity benchmarks on the benches of international courts. While some courts have made incremental progress, others are still lagging. Using the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACtHPR) as a case study, this chapter explores the factors that have contributed to the court’s gender parity outcomes in recent years. Moving beyond discussions of why women should be appointed, the chapter advances an argument on how to achieve gender parity through the creative interplay of three factors—legal instruments, specific strategies, and vested actors. The chapter makes a contribution to the literature on gender and diversity in international courts by highlighting some best practices for achieving and sustaining gender parity on the benches of international courts.

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Women on International Courts: Some Lessons Learned

International Criminal Law Review ◽

10.1163/157181211x576320 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 11 (3) ◽

pp. 401-408 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Patricia Wald

Keyword(s):

Criminal Justice ◽

International Criminal ◽

Lessons Learned ◽

International Criminal Justice ◽

Humanitarian Law ◽

International Courts ◽

Women Judges ◽

The Way

AbstractWomen have achieved much since the revival of international criminal justice. But much remains to be achieved, both in the number and quality of women judges and in the way that women's concerns are addressed, as the implementation of complementarity shifts humanitarian law from international to national judicial arenas.

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The Contribution of Women Judges and Prosecutors to the Development of International Criminal Law

Identity and Diversity on the International Bench ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198870753.003.0017 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 355-365 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Teresa Doherty

Keyword(s):

Sexual Violence ◽

Sierra Leone ◽

Criminal Law ◽

International Criminal ◽

International Criminal Tribunal ◽

International Criminal Law ◽

International Courts ◽

Women Judges ◽

Broad Interpretation ◽

Active Contribution

Few female judges were appointed to the benches of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and Special Court for Sierra Leone. Nevertheless, those appointments resulted in an active contribution of these women judges to the development of international criminal law, as is shown in the jurisprudence. Judges give judgement on the evidence, facts, and law before them, but women judges have been noted for advancing the existing law through broad interpretation. With the appointment of women investigators and prosecutors, more prosecutions for crimes of sexual violence followed. This is important as it progressively developed a field of law that had until then not, or only in a more limited manner, been adjudicated upon before international courts.

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Why Fighting Structural Inequalities Requires Institutionalizing Difference: A Response to Nienke Grossman

AJIL Unbound ◽

10.1017/s2398772300002877 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 110 ◽

pp. 92-97 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Neus Torbisco-Casals

Keyword(s):

Supreme Court ◽

Selection Procedures ◽

Judicial Selection ◽

International Courts ◽

Women Judges ◽

Contingent Fact ◽

Male Dominated ◽

Underrepresentation Of Women ◽

Structural Inequalities

People ask me sometimes, when—when do you think it will be enough? When will there be enough women on the court? And my answer is when there are nine.Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Supreme CourtNienke Grossman offers a much needed overview of the statistical patterns behind the substantial underrepresentation of women in international courts benches. As her inquiry reveals, despite the growing proportion of female qualified lawyers, sex representativeness has hardly improved in recent years. On the contrary, in the absence of special requirements in courts’ statutes or judicial selection procedures, the percentage of women judges has actually stagnated or even declined in some cases. Such acute sex imbalance cannot be attributed to the (contingent) fact that not enough qualified women are available for such highly prestigious positions. Grossman persuasively contests the plausibility of this widespread assumption. Not only is the limited-pool argument fallacious, but, as her analysis suggests, part of the problem might actually be that judicial selection procedures lack transparency and arenotdriven by merit. Instead, nominations of international judges are often used “to reward political loyalty or to advance political agendas”; this practice seriously impinges on the chances of women to be appointed as international judges, as politics (both domestic and international) remains very much a male-dominated sphere.

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