Advocating for Security Council Action,

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 14:07:35 +0000

by Sam Cook

Of the many gendered impacts of war, sexual and gender-based violence is often held up as one of the most obvious and outrageous. Yet it is also one of the most difficult issues on which to get the Security Council to act. Although the Council, in adopting Resolution 1325 in 2000, recognized the gendered impact of war it has done little that is not rhetorical to address this violence. For the text of the resolution visit this page.

Sam Cook runs the PeaceWomen Project at the UN office of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom – an international women’s peace organization founded in 1915 in the Hague. The project monitors and advocates for the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security.SCR 1325 addresses sexual and gender-based violence through calling on parties to armed conflict to respect international law; it also emphasizes the responsibility of all States to end impunity, including for sexual and gender-based violence, and to prosecute perpetrators of war crimes and exclude sexual and gender-based crimes from amnesty provisions. Parties to armed conflict are also called on to take special measures to protect women and girls from gender-based violence. The above obligations are ones to be taken on by parties to armed conflict and governments. What then is the role of the Security Council as such in addressing this violence?

Part of the answer to this lies in the commitment made by the Security Council to integrating SCR 1325 in its day-to-day work. One function the Council performs is adopting resolutions which, amongst other things, set up the mandates of UN peace support operations. It is these Security Council Resolutions which set up the roles and responsibilities of any particular mission including whether they have a mandate to focus on the protection of women and girls from sexual and gender-based violence or to monitor and report on this violence. There has been some progress in including these responsibilities in mission mandates. Several of the UN peace support operations are mandated to act in relation to sexual and gender-based violence and several have mandates to monitor and report on human-rights violations and, in particular, sexual and gender-based violence. Read the rest of this post...

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Advocating for Security Council Action,