EN
Shaped over the centuries, the laws and customs of war have always included rules based on the principle of chivalry, a sense of humanity directed at protecting non-combatants. Most of the victims of today’s armed conflicts are civilians, mainly women and children. The problem of rape and sexual violence during armed conflict particularly affects women. Rape committed in war is used to terrorize the population, break up families, destroy communities, sometimes also to change the ethnic structure of successive generations. Sexual violence is a violation of international humanitarian law of armed conflict, but we have often seen in history that this issue has been passed over in silence or treated as a side effect of war. Special attention should be paid to the criminalization of sexual violence. The UN Security Council only recognized the problem of sexual violence in armed conflict in 1992, when news of the mass rape of women and girls in the former Yugoslavia circulated around the world. In December 1992, the UN adopted a declaration that “the mass, organized and systematic detention and rape of women in Bosnia and Herzegovina, particularly Muslim women, is an international crime that must be prosecuted” (UN Security Council, 1992). Unfortunately, during and in the immediate aftermath of conflicts, it remains extremely difficult to bring justice to perpetrators of violence against women.