CIJA participates in the UN Team of Experts on Sexual Violence in Conflict's Fifth Digital Dialogue
On 25 January, CIJA Senior Advisor on sexual and gender-based violence, Stephanie Barbour, participated as a panelist in the UN Team of Experts on Rule of Law and Sexual Violence in Conflict´s Fifth Digital Dialogue entitled “The importance of a label: understanding the impunity gap for conflict-related sexual violence crimes associated with slavery and trafficking."
The event juxtaposed and explored critical intersections in the investigation of the crimes of slavery, the slave trade and trafficking. In her remarks, Barbour discussed the challenges of investigating the slave trade of women and children by Islamic State (IS) in Northern Iraq and Syria and outlined the elements of CIJA´s large-scale situational investigation model, which enabled the collection of critical multi-layered, corroborative evidence of IS enslavement practices. Drawing on her recent contribution to the Special Issue of the Journal of International Criminal Justice, Barbour also presented the strategies CIJA has adopted to ensure that its collections meet criminal evidentiary standards irrespective of the jurisdiction in which they are to be used, as well as the organisation´s analytical approaches to characterising the crimes of enslavement, slave trade and trafficking under different domestic and international legal regimes.
During the event, moderated by Patricia Viseur Sellers, Special Advisor for Gender for the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Barbour was joined by panelists Ameena Saeed, former Iraqi MP, Yezidi Kurd advocate on trafficking and slavery; Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum, Professor of Law, Cardozo Law School; Aimee Comrie, Project Coordinator for GLO.ACT Asia and the Middle East, UNODC; and Valiant Richey, OSCE Special Representative and Coordinator for Combating Trafficking in Human Beings.
A video recording of the Dialogue is available here. Stephanie Barbour’s presentation starts at 17:11.