Abstract

What does it mean to prosecute forced marriage as crime against humanity? Forced marriages during authoritarian regime is a form of sexualized and gender-based violence, as it aims specifically to the sexuality and reproductive ability in the female bodies. In its turn, prosecuting forced marriage as crimes against humanity promise to reconcile the victims with humanity, where victims are represented as a part of the human community. This article examines the process of translating forced marriage victims’ bodies into the realm of global justice through the prosecution of forced marriage as international core crimes. In doing so, it utilizes the notion of ‘feminist geolegality’, an approach that sees the ‘indissolvable relations’ between law, space and the workings of power across multiple scales, from the intimate to the global as a whole. In other words, feminist geolegality challenges the dualistic binaries by analysing the co-constitution between law and space in multiple scales of space, from the intimate space of bodies to the global space of international law. Applying this theoretical perspective in the field of international criminal law, and specifically focusing on the problem of victims’ participation in international criminal proceedings, this article re-conceptualises the practice of prosecuting and representing the victims before international criminal courts as a process of translating the victims into the legal realm and transcending them through multiple scales of legal space. And yet, through the lens of feminist geolegality, the article observes how the victims of forced marriage are translated from bodies under violence to the bodies before the law, where the intersection of space and law occurs in multiple scales. From there, on the same strand of feminist legal scholars, I argue for a whollistic perspective for the issue of victims of sexual violence before international criminal tribunals.