Countless women and girls have been abducted, raped, forcibly assigned as ‘wives’ to combatants and held captive within such forced marriages in conflict zones around the world. Forced marriage as an international crime remains controversial because it (i) is not codified in any international criminal statute, (ii) involves conduct overlapping with already-enumerated crimes against humanity and (iii) is inconsistently defined. Legal protections for girls in forced marriage reside in historical proscriptions against various forms of slavery — banned by jus cogens norms, international human rights and humanitarian law — including the crimes against humanity of sexual slavery and enslavement. Yet, despite similarities between forced marriage and numerous forms of slavery, international criminal courts have not yet prosecuted or convicted forced marriage as enslavement, and even its conviction as sexual slavery insufficiently captures the unique, multi-layered injuries its youngest victims suffer. International tribunals confronting evidence of very young girls captured as ‘wives’ and of female child soldiers serving as sex slaves have failed to adequately recognize or redress the egregious harms girl endure through forced marriage. Competing judicial and academic views on its proper classification have obscured courts’ oversight of forced marriage’s most vulnerable victims — female children. This article argues that, to advance justice for girls in conflict zones and end impunity for these atrocities, greater judicial emphasis is needed on the constellation of internationally recognized fundamental human rights of children violated by forced marriage, whether prosecuted as an ‘other inhumane act’ or slavery-related crime against humanity.

中文翻译：

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结束冲突地区强迫婚姻的有罪不罚现象

在世界各地的冲突地区，无数妇女和女孩被绑架、强奸、被强行分配为战斗人员的“妻子”，并被囚禁在这种强迫婚姻中。强迫婚姻作为一种国际犯罪仍然存在争议，因为它 (i) 没有编入任何国际刑事法规，(ii) 涉及与已经列举的危害人类罪重叠的行为，以及 (iii) 定义不一致。对强迫婚姻中的女孩的法律保护存在于历史上禁止各种形式的奴役——被强制法规范、国际人权和人道主义法所禁止——包括性奴役和奴役等危害人类罪。然而，尽管强迫婚姻与多种形式的奴役有相似之处，国际刑事法院尚未将强迫婚姻作为奴役起诉或定罪，甚至将其定罪为性奴役也不足以反映其最年轻的受害者所遭受的独特、多层次的伤害。国际法庭在面对被俘为“妻子”的年轻女孩和充当性奴隶的女童兵的证据时，未能充分认识到或纠正女孩因强迫婚姻而遭受的严重伤害。关于其适当分类的相互竞争的司法和学术观点掩盖了法院对强迫婚姻最脆弱的受害者——女童的监督。本文认为，为了为冲突地区的女孩伸张正义并结束对这些暴行的有罪不罚，