Justice, Rule of Law and Security Sector Reform

We all know that one of the elements used to legitimize such acts has been the concept of the sexual honour of women as being the basis of male honour. Hence sexual violence against women, sexual slavery and forced pregnancy become acts that are justifiable in time of armed conflict, on the basis of the argument that they meet the needs of men.

Those important advances are without a doubt the result of the jurisprudence of the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the statements condemning sexual violence against women made at Beijing and Vienna, and the active participation of the women's movement.

That was also a turning point in the context of impunity — against impunity in law, which has its origins in norms such as amnesties, and impunity in act, which runs the gamut from complicity on the part of public power, to the passivity of investigators, to selectivity or corruption on the part of the judiciary.

Such vulnerability is particularly acute in the field of criminal procedural law, where a perverse cycle of victimization of women occurs. In cases of sexual violence, victims are routinely interrogated about their participation in the crime; they are exposed to unacceptable standards of proof; their lives are investigated and assessed; their testimony is minimized or rejected; and their claims are silenced.

Six years later, the focus on the human rights approach and the gender perspective was to imbue the most important instrument of international criminal law: the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Based on that significant progress, violence against women is now recognized as a human rights violation in that it flouts a series of rights and fundamental freedoms, including the right to life; the right not to be subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; the right to equality before the law; the right to equality in the family; and the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, inter alia.

As we move along the road to equality, a key milestone has been the entry into force of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. There, for the first time, it was recognized in the framework of international humanitarian law that rape and other forms of sexual and gender violence are crimes as serious as genocide, torture, cruel treatment, mutilation and slavery.

In Somalia, our collective efforts over the past months have freed Luul Ali Osman and those who have dared to speak out in support of her cause. Last week, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, speaking to military cadets in Mogadishu, declared that security forces who raped citizens of Somalia would be fought and defeated like any enemy of the State. I commend the President and his Government for their resolve to address the problem.

For UN missions, better prevention involves equipping peacekeepers and civilian staff with the guidance and expertise to respond to early information about threats of large-scale abuses.

We must also build reformed national justice sectors and local institutions that can hold accountable those responsible for sexual violence while international criminal justice mechanisms continue to play their important role in ending impunity for these crimes.