OndoReporter | French minister urges UN to use ‘femicide’ in international law

OndoReporter | French minister urges UN to use ‘femicide’ in international law
Highlighting the fate of Iraq's Yazidi women
who are raped and slain by Islamic State
group jihadists, a French minister called on the
United Nations to incorporate 'femicide' in
international law.

Young women of the Yazidi minority are often
taken by IS fighters as sex slaves, then killed.

"It is because they are women and they are
Yazidis that they are sold and murdered" by
the IS fighters, said Laurence Rossignol,
France's minister for family, children and
women's rights, speaking Wednesday at the
60th annual Commission on the Status of
Women.

"What they are experiencing is femicide," she
emphasized.

While genocide -- the killing of a large group of
people of a nationality or ethnic group -- is
part of the international legal vocabulary,
femicide -- the deliberate and violent killing of
women -- is not, Rossignol said.

The international military coalition fighting in
Iraq and Syria "should say that it is not only
at war against the terrorism of the Islamic
State group, but it is also there to free the
Yazidi women of the femicide that the suffer,"
Rossignol said.

Rossignol wants to see the term femicide,
which is already in use by women's rights
groups, become "the basis for prosecution in
international courts," and eventually taken up
by the International Criminal Court, Rossignol
told AFP.

The Hague-based ICC is empowered to try war
crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
In March 2015, a UN report said that attacks
in Iraq by the IS group against the Yazidi
minority "could constitute genocide."

The femicide concept could also be applied to
the kidnapping of young women by the Boko
Haram fighters in Nigeria, Rossignol added.
The French minister also urged the UN
commission to fully decriminalize abortion
around the world, and allow broader access to
contraception, especially due to an increased
use of rape as a method of warfare.