CCPR/C/114/D/2234/2013 State authorities. The issue in this case is whether the author was subjected to this particularly egregious form of sexual abuse because she was a woman. As other human rights bodies, including the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women and the European Court of Human Rights, have recognized, violence that is committed on the basis of sex or gender is discrimination. 8 The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women defines gender-based violence as violence that is directed against a woman because she is a woman or that affects women disproportionately.9 Under this approach, not all acts of violence committed against women are discrimination; violence is gender based if it is “motivated by ‘factors concerned with gender,’ such as the need to assert male power and control, to enforce assigned gender roles or to punish perceived deviant female behavior”.10 The mere fact that abuses such as rape or forced sterilization are also capable of being committed against men does not preclude the possibility that they can constitute gender-based discrimination. 4. In the present case, the author presents compelling evidence that she was singled out for egregious harassment, abuse and torture because of her political opinion as a human rights activist. But the peculiarly gendered nature of her abuse — threats of rape by the police, gang rape while in detention and forced sterilization through the removal of her uterus — establishes compellingly that State agents chose the form of her abuse because she was a woman. There is no question that this conduct, which the Committee also properly finds constituted torture and extreme gender-based violence, cannot be supported by any reasonable and objective justification or legitimate aim. The Committee thus correctly finds that the author was discriminated against because of her sex in violation of article 26. 8 9 10 See Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, general recommendation No. 19 (1992), para. 6; European Court of Human Rights, Opuz v. Turkey, application No. 33401/02, judgement of 9 June 2009, paras. 187, 190, 202 (citing with approval jurisprudence of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that violence against women is a form of discrimination against women, and finding the State’s failure to effectively address domestic violence constituted discrimination in violation of article 14 in conjunction with article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights); Mudric v. Moldova, application No. 74839/10, judgement of 16 October 2013, para. 64 (same). See Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, general recommendation No. 19, para. 6. See M. Freeman, C. Chinkin, and B. Rudolf, eds., The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women: A Commentary (2012), p. 452. 19