Argentina

In that connection, I should like to recall what Patrick Cammaert, former Deputy Force Commander of the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, said in 2008: it is more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in a modern conflict.

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. The atrocities documented at the time and the survivors' testimonies of massive violations — rapes in camps, mutilations, sexual slavery and forced pregnancies — moved humankind's ethical consciousness, while sexual violence in armed conflicts seized being an invisible crime or an immutable tradition. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the Special Court for Sierra Leone decisively made progress in classifying sexual violence, in particular rape in conflict situations, as torture, a war crime and a crime against humanity. With complete clarity, the International Criminal Court Statute would subsequently establish that acts of rape, sexual slavery, prostitution, forced pregnancy or sterilization or any other form of sexual violence of comparable severity constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.

"From resolution 1208 (1998), on security for refugees, which underscores the special security needs of women in camps, to resolution 1314 (2000), which underscores the importance of prevention, disarmament, demobilization and reintegration policies including a gender perspective, it is clear we have made progress. However, it was particularly through resolution 1325 (2000) and subsequent resolutions focused on the situation of women in conflict and post-conflict situations that the Council underscored, as priorities in achieving lasting peace, the promotion and protection of women's human rights and their equal participation in transitional justice and reconciliation processes, as well as a human rights perspective and a gender perspective in all the efforts and programmes for development, peace, security and the building and strengthening of the rule of law."

"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. In another area of that continent, a woman reported that, when women tried to escape, their children were killed. She said that they raped lots of women and girls and were happy when they raped them. They even sang while they raped them and told them they had the right to do whatever they wish with women. In another country, a women's organization told us that the criminal code there still interprets rape as a form of adultery. If a women cannot prove that there was no consent and if there are not at least four witnesses who confirm her testimony, women are punished for adultery by whipping or stoning. In a country in Asia, we heard recently from a group of women who were subjected to sexual torture. Their genitals were burned, they said. They were forced into prostitution by security forces, rebel groups and members of peacekeeping missions. In Europe, a women from the former Yugoslavia testified that in the camps the soldiers raped her all day long. She would fall asleep, but when she awoke a different soldier would be in her bed."

"However, we still have much to do to achieve women's effective equality as people with rights and to achieve equal representation in decision-making arenas, and for those reasons, we welcome the resolution adopted today (resolution 2122 (2013))."