ARTIKEL CARMELA BUEHLER Legal officer with the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo; completing a Master degree in international public law/ supranational criminal law at the University of Leiden The crime of forced pregnancy in the nascent system of supranational criminal law Tot in de jaren negentig werd gedwongen zwanger- schap niet erkend als apart misdrijf in het internationale recht. Voorzover er sprake was van erkenning van gen- der-gerelateerde misdrijven, werden deze uitsluitend ge- kwalificeerd als 'moral cri- mes': misdrijven tegen de eer van de vrouw en haar fami- lie. Pas onder invloed van on- der andere de rapporten over de verkrachtingskam- pen in de Balkan kwam hier- in verandering. Uiteindelijk leidde dit tot de erkenning van seksueel ge- weld als niet louter een 'fa- miliekwestie', maar als een schending van de mensen- rechten van vrouwen en tot het opnemen van gedwongen zwangerschap als een apart misdrijf in de Statuten van het nieuwe Internationale Strafhof. Welke ontwikkelin- gen maakten dit mogelijk en wat is de rechtvaardiging voor het opnemen van ge- dwongen zwangerschap als apart internationaal misdrijf, naast het 'traditionele' mis- drijf van verkrachting? War crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide Forced pregnancy was until the 90's not recognised as a distinct criminal act, but obscured by the blurry language that typified crimes of sexual violence.1 It was during the conflicts around the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia when the world became aware of the atrocities committed in the Balkan 'rape camps', triggering the explicit ban of the crime in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Statute defines forced pregnancy as: " ... the unlawful confinement, of a woman forcibly made pregnant, with the in- tent of affecting the ethnic composition of any population or carrying out other grave violations of international law ... '2 and opens the door for the prosecution of forced pregnancy as a crime against humanity and as a war crime. This article will attempt to record the events that led to the codification of forced pregnancy as a crime in an international legal instrument. Accordingly, it will be necessary to include a consideration of other crimes of sexual violence, in par- ticular rape. Further, given that the jurisdiction of the ad hoc tribunals for the for- mer Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR) were instrumental to the negotia- tions of the ICC Statute and as such were indispensable for the development of forced pregnancy as a separate crime, it will discuss the aspects that might have been crucial for this process. Having analysed the ICC provisions, the essay will conclude with a discussion of the justification for the inclusion of forced preg- nancy as a separate crime - an underlying assumption of this article being that forced pregnancy is a crime without foundation in customary law and with no tradition in domestic law, and thereby a crime that has to justify its emergence. A historical approach to the crime Far into this century crimes of sexual violence were qualified as solely