On 6 October 2025, the Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) found Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman – a senior Janjaweed commander – guilty of 27 counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes. Those crimes were committed during Omar al-Bashir’s presidency in Darfur, Sudan, between August 2003 and April 2004. Two of those counts were for the crime against humanity of gender persecution, the first conviction for this crime in the court’s 23-year history. This is a significant and much-needed moment for gender justice in international criminal law.  

Background to the gender persecution charge

In 2007, the Office of the Prosecutor to the ICC (‘OTP’) was granted an arrest warrant for Abd-Al-Rahman for his role in atrocities committed against Darfuri civilians. The warrant included persecution charges, though none on gender grounds. Only in 2020 was Abd-Al-Rahman arrested, triggering the charge confirmation process, and providing the OTP an opportunity to reconsider its charges. In the intervening thirteen years, the OTP had released its 2014 policy paper on sexual and gender-based crimes, and in 2019 the Pre-Trial Chamber (‘PTC’) had for the first time confirmed the charge of gender persecution in the Al Hassan case.

In early 2021 the OTP filed its brief in Abd-Al-Rahman’s case, including persecution on gender, political and ethnic grounds for two charges. It identified the targeted groups as Fur males at two locations within Darfur, each location being a separate charge. The OTP argued that the males were targeted on gender grounds because of the ‘socially-constructed gender role presuming males to be fighters’ [para 129]. No underlying act was of a sextual nature: instead, the acts were torture, murder, and cruel treatment. This was a novel construction by the OTP: at first a ‘less obvious form of gender persecution, absent women, and absent sexual violence’, as I have argued elsewhere.

Also novel was the OTP’s explicit positioning of the discriminatory grounds as intersectional. It described these ‘multiple intersecting discriminatory grounds’ as best encompassing the persecutory conduct [para 129]. By mid-2021 the PTC confirmed each count, a significant development for recognising the gendered victimisation of males within mass atrocities.

Gender persecution, the judgment

Even more significant were the recent convictions, following an almost two-year trial. In finding Abd-Al-Rahman guilty, the Trial Chamber methodically considered the myriad complex persecution elements (from para 778), drawing on jurisprudence from the Al Hassan, Ongwen, and Ntaganda trial judgments. It had no difficulty addressing the broad underlying acts and the intersecting forms of discrimination. Moreover, this was a unanimous judgment with no separate opinions, unlike the Trial Chamber who in 2024 acquitted Al Hassan of gender persecution, with more decisions than judges.

This judgment is a milestone. We see how the charge of gender persecution can surface the multi-layered relationship between gender as it relates to constructed notions of masculinities, violence, politics, and ethnicity. It also allows us to better understand what it means to be persecuted on gender grounds, and to better understand gender in international criminal law. In turn, it demonstrates what more the charge can and should do in protecting civilians from persecution.

What next?

The Trial Chamber will deliver its judgment on 9 December 2025, the parties’ having only filed their sentence submissions and conducted their oral argument in November. . However, Defence have already filed notice of their appeal, including specifically that the Chamber erred in its approach to gender persecution.

Meanwhile the ICC’s Said trial has all but concluded its gender persecution charges largely mirroring Abd-al-Rahman, with closing statements occurring in late November 2025. Earlier in November, the PTC confirmed the charges in absentia against Jospeh Kony, including three charges of persecution on age and gender grounds. Earlier in July, the PTC issued arrest warrants for two Taliban leaders for persecution on gender grounds against girls, women and other persons non-conforming with the Taliban’s policy on gender, gender identity or expression. The situations in Nigeria and Bangladesh/Myanmar continue, also with a focus on gender persecution.

As the OTP itself acknowledged in its 2022 policy paper on gender persecution, ‘despite over 20 years of official recognition, the Office has only just begun to bring charges of gender persecution … leaving a gap in the development of international criminal jurisprudence’ (4). That gap appears now to be closing.