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. For this, see the PeaceWomen Project's compilation of language on women and gender issues from peacekeeping mandates.
Also on the 1325 Resolution on openDemocracy: 15 articles and a multi-authored blog
Including this language in mandates is an important step, but the Security Council's response to sexual and gender-based violence goes beyond this. The Security Council is, inter alia, also responsible for deciding on the presence of peacekeeping missions or, if they already exist, when and how they should be reduced in size or withdrawn. Many of these decisions are made based on the existing security situation in a country and violence against women and girls, including sexual and gender-based violence, should be seen as a critical part of this context. For this to be the case, it is essential that information on this violence gets to the Council. There is little doubt that such violence occurs in most if not all conflict situations and several credible human rights organizations have monitored and reported on this violence in specific situations. Yet in the very same situations on which these groups have reported and in the same time periods there is very little reporting on the extent of sexual and gender-based violence or on specific data on incidents in the Secretary-General's country-specific or peacekeeping mission reports to the Security Council (these are for the most part generated by the missions based on their activities and analysis of the situation), even when human rights monitoring and reporting, including in relation to SGBV, is part of the mandate. The most detailed reporting in this area is in relation to sexual exploitation and abuse by UN personnel (SEA) (as opposed to that committed by other parties, which is far more extensive). In part this may be a reflection of the fact that Mission mandates invariably have a specific clause on SEA but their mandate in relation to other SGBV may be non-existent or vague. It is also the case that reporting on violence against women or on sexual violence more specifically is focused more on reports of programs or strategies worked on or being implemented by the Mission or in collaboration with the government than on the extent of the problem and the effectiveness of these programs and strategies.
Unfortunately it is these SG's reports, deemed credible sources of information upon which the Council relies, are essentially giving an inaccurate picture of the security situation and issues affecting a significant portion of the population; decisions are being made without the benefit of full information.
The need for the development of information gathering tools and reporting mechanisms is clear and this has been recognized at some level - at least rhetorically. There was significant advocacy done during the lead up to the 7th Anniversary of 1325 in October to make advances on this but to date we have seen almost no progress. The PeaceWomen Project is, for its 16 Days contribution, reiterating previous NGO calls to Security Council members to:
- Support the establishment of a focal point or dedicated monitoring mechanism to increase the Council's contribution to preventing and redressing violence against women in armed conflict, as called for by the Secretary-General in his recent study on violence against women;
- Call for the Secretary-General to ensure that there is comprehensive country-specific reporting on sexual violence to the Council from peace-support operations and that such information is also included in regular country-specific reporting;
- Consider means by which the Council could more effectively end impunity and hold parties to account for these violations.
