Justice, Rule of Law and Security Sector Reform

Local justice remains critical to the long-term healing and the reconciliation of communities, and affected States need to ensure accountability for conflict-related crimes. But to be effective, this must include justice for crimes of sexual violence.

In post-conflict settings, women's full and effective participation is fundamental to efforts to rebuild the justice sector and to security sector reform. In Solomon Islands for example, Australia supported, through the Participating Police Force, the post-conflict recruitment and retention of female officers to the local police force.

In post-conflict settings, women's full and effective participation is fundamental to efforts to rebuild the justice sector and to security sector reform. In Solomon Islands for example, Australia supported, through the Participating Police Force, the post-conflict recruitment and retention of female officers to the local police force.

We view this open debate as an opportunity to highlight the policies and programmes aimed at supporting national ownership and reform of justice systems that place women's rights and access to justice for women at their heart. As the recent declaration of the Peacebuilding Commission on women's economic empowerment for peacebuilding underscores, societies that invest in women see exponential dividends from such investments.

Transitional justice mechanisms and reparations programmes in particular have an important role in and impact on societies recovering from conflict. When linked to development efforts, such measures can have sustainable and transformative impacts for victims, and for women victims in particular.

Recently, the United Nations has developed an increasingly sophisticated network for specialized gender experts for deployment to mediation, transitional justice and prosecutorial processes. Member States should avail themselves of these important resources.

"We cannot lock ourselves inside a laboratory to restore and recognize women's human rights or to build a genuine rule of law. In that connection, I would like to end with the testimony of women from various parts of the world. In this century, in one country in Africa, 1,152 women were raped every day — that is 48 every hour or four every five minutes.

"It is true that much remains to be done.

In accordance with that progressive increase in awareness, the Security Council's trajectory shows an awareness and increasing commitment to preventing and eradicating sexual and gender-based discrimination in situations of conflict and post-conflict situations, as well as a commitment to ensuring that when sexist crimes are committed, the perpetrators will not enjoy impunity, that there is justice and redress for the victims and that societie

Although we still hear that violence is as old as war itself and that women's bodies have been a battlefield for centuries throughout the world, the experience in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Rwanda served to scuttle the cynical acceptance of sexual violence as a natural phenomenon in armed conflicts, and of rape as a weapon of war of devastating power.