On the occasion of International Women’s Day, celebrated annually on the 8th of March, Völkerrechtsblog hosts the ‘Women in International Law’ symposium. Held each year during this week, it features blog posts, interviews, and podcasts on women’s rights, feminist approaches to international law, and the challenges faced by female scholars in international legal academia.
The fourth annual ‘Women in International Law’ symposium features contributions received following our relevant Call for Papers and will primarily focus on current developments affecting women in conflict zones and beyond. Considering the significant impacts of ongoing conflicts, the initial contributions of the symposium will focus on the deficiencies and potential of humanitarian, criminal, and human rights law in addressing these challenges. Additional symposium contributions will further address other contemporary issues and recent developments in human rights and environmental law.
More specifically, Natali Gbele and Hanna Welte will kick off the symposium with an analysis of the glaring gender gap in international humanitarian law, showing how outdated treaties fail to protect women in war. Their contribution makes a call for a new, feminist-driven Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions that explicitly bans sexual violence, ensures comprehensive gender protections, mandates equal participation in peace processes, and enforces accountability.
Then, Melanie O’Brien and Kathleen Maloney will analyze how the ICC’s Al Hassan judgment undermines gender justice by acquitting sexual and gender-based crimes, reflecting entrenched patriarchal biases in international law. Subsequently, Anjana Sathy will argue that the Taliban’s systematic oppression of women in Afghanistan constitutes gender apartheid and should be prosecuted as an ‘other inhumane act’ under the Rome Statute, building on the Ongwen case, where the ICC confirmed that forced marriage constitutes a distinct crime against humanity.
Wednesday’s contributions will have a clear climate justice-related focus. Precisely, Alana Lancaster will argue that women and girls are not victims, but valuable agents of change in the (en)gendering of climate justice. In this context, strengthening their procedural rights and safeguarding their relevant substantive rights is, as the author will stress, crucial. Dilruba Begüm Kartepe and Mariia Zheltukha will then zoom in on the ECtHR’s judgement in Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others v. Switzerland and will argue that by relying on ‘neutral’ standards, the Court reinforces existing structural biases and, thus, fails to ensure substantive equality for women.
Subsequently, Siobhan Airey will critique how international economic law perpetuates structural gender inequalities, particularly in Special Economic Zones, where women’s labor is both central to global trade and systematically exploited, arguing that international economic law’s “gender turn” fails to address economic violence against women and calling for a deeper intersectional feminist rethinking of global economic governance. Afterward, Selin Altay will examine Germany’s new Self-Determination Act, which allows transgender, intersex, and non-binary individuals to legally change their gender through self-declaration. Her contribution challenges claims that gender self-identification threatens cisgender women, arguing instead that the real issue is structural violence against both cis and trans women, and calls for a more inclusive, fact-based approach to gender rights and protections.
Finally, a podcast episode with Vitsche e.V. will challenge the traditional victimhood portrayal of women in armed conflict, explore how Ukrainian women’s resistance embodies feminist principles, discuss the fight against Russian disinformation as a means of pursuing justice, and examine the intersection of feminist activism and anti-colonial perspectives.
The choice of whitework embroidery for the symposium cover is no accident. Like the intricate white-on-white stitches, that require a discerning eye to be fully seen, the role of women in international law has been ever-present, yet too often overlooked. Whitework, found across cultures, carries the weight of history, its threads being woven into narratives of labor, identity, and resilience. The seminal Ukrainian feminist work, “Feminists Despite Themselves”, titled “White on White” in translation, draws on this very metaphor, bridging feminism and whitework.
The resurgence of embroidery as an art form further mirrors a broader engagement with what has been undervalued and unseen. Once dismissed as lacking seriousness, embroidery is now reclaimed as a powerful medium of expression. The symposium cover’s transformation, where the embroidered white words are illuminated in blue, echoes this act of recognition, highlighting the interwoven presence of women in international law.
