In parallel with developments in international humanitarian law after World War II, rape has progressively gained recognition as an international crime, including a crime against humanity. Rape has been accepted as an explicit form of crimes against humanity through the inclusion of international crimes in military codes and national legislation. More recently, the recognition of rape as an international crime has been anchored in its inclusion in the statutes of international courts and tribunals and their modern judicial interpretation. The declarations, resolutions, reports, commissions, preparatory meetings and other courts and tribunals created in the 1990s and early 21st century provided that the jurisdiction invoked by these international bodies would certainly include crimes of sexual violence , as violations central to international humanitarian law and international criminal law, including crimes against humanity. The constituent instruments of these international judicial bodies, to varying degrees, have confirmed this prediction. The statutes of the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Court for Rwanda, the Special Committees on Serious Crimes and the International Criminal Court (ICC) list the crime of rape, along with other expressly mentioned sexual crimes such as trafficking and slavery, which at first glance are not of a sexual nature, but crimes whose actus reus could certainly include acts of sexual violence. Provisions of these constitutive instruments which established the subject matter jurisdiction of these international bodies mandated that the following crimes involving sexual violence could form the basis for criminal charges: a) The...... half of the document ......The Definitions in the Statutes regarding genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes do not spell out all the general legal elements of each category or the legal elements in relation to each of the underlying crimes such as rape and sexual slavery. However, courts have developed jurisprudence in this regard.ii. Violent and serious nature of the relevant crimes Crimes of a sexual nature – i.e. gender-based, sex-based or sexual crimes – amounting to genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes are almost always physically violent and/or seriously denigrating . By nature, crimes involving sexual violence are serious, otherwise they would not constitute or amount to heinous crimes. For the purposes of this document, sexual atrocities, sex-based atrocities and gender-based atrocities are generally referred to as “sexual violence”.”.