INTERNATIONAL/CANADA: Nobel Winner Calls on Canada to Lead Effort Against Rape

Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams arrived in Ottawa this weekend with a mission for Canada: to reclaim its image as the white knight of international human rights.

A key player in a series of human-rights breakthroughs in the 1990s, including the ban on landmines that Williams spearheaded, recent setbacks such as the failure to get a seat on the UN security Council have cast doubt on Canada's international cachet.

Now, Williams is calling on Canada to take centre stage again: “Canada showed tremendous leadership in achieving the (treaty) banning anti-personnel landmines. … Now, Canada can play a key role in ending a horrific tactic of war: rape.”

She and the six other women who now hold the peace prize want Canada to get behind their effort to push for an end to the ongoing epidemic of sexual violence against women in conflict zones and countries in crisis.

Sexual violence has become an increasingly common weapon of war, they warn, because most wars are now internal clashes in which civilians are the main targets. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for example, at least 200,000 women have been raped in ongoing clashes, according to United Nations reports.

Through a group called the Nobel Women's Initiative, the laureates have called an international conference on the issue in Montebello, Que. — about 60 kilometres northeast of Ottawa — on Monday through Wednesday. On Thursday, they go to Parliament Hill, where they have invited the main party leaders, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to meet with them.

“We all have a responsibility to do more in the face of this horrific violence against women, and we hope we can count on Canada's leadership,” says Williams.

The event comes after a series of setbacks for Canada on the international stage. In October, Canada failed to get a Security Council seat — the first time in more than 50 years it has lost such a bid. The government is still smarting from the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, where its actions prompted one Guardian columnist to call it a “thuggish petro-state” dominated by “tar barons.”

Last year, a Canadian bid to lead the G8 nations in an effort to improve child and maternal health drew fire when it emerged that Canada would not fund programs that perform abortions.

Williams is hoping the Tories will embrace the push to end sexual violence with the same commitment their Liberal predecessors showed when then-foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy led the charge for the landmine ban.

“It's a real opportunity,” says Axworthy. “This is an issue Canadians have always cared about.”

It's a chance for Canada to work its soft-power magic, the way it did in the 1990s when it helped create the International Criminal Court and pushed for UN measures to protect civilians, he says.

“Canada continues to be in a very strategic position. … We've got wealth, we've got a good diplomatic system and we should be putting that more actively to work.”

Axworthy also wants to see more boots on the ground: “For God's sake, let's do something in the Congo.”

At the UN, Canada has pushed for change as a member of a group of countries called Friends of Women, Peace and Security, and through the umbrella agency, UN Women. And it remains a key player in multilateral projects such as the Joint Initiative to Reduce Sexual Violence in the DRC, offering training to more than 5,400 political leaders and funding health care for survivors.

Last fall, Canada launched a National Action Plan on sexual violence in conflict zones, in response to a series of UN resolutions.

The sweeping plan calls for a host of measures, such as improving peacekeeper training, increasing women's participation in the peace process and ensuring they get the aid they need. The directives apply across “the whole of government,” and the plan includes a list of “indicators,” or ways of measuring compliance.

“It's a positive step that will move Canada in the right direction,” says Lindsay Mossman of Amnesty International.

However, it's also a case of better late than never, she adds: the plan was tabled 10 years after a UN Security Council resolution first called on its members to do more to protect women.

In fact, Canada was 21st among the 24 countries to introduce national action plans so far, behind Ivory Coast and even Rwanda, according to the UN watchdog group, PeaceWomen.

“We're supposed to be an international leader on women's rights,” says Mossman. “Whereas the government of Liberia had an action plan. So why didn't we?”

Claude Rochon, of the Department of Foreign Affairs, says the 2000 UN resolution “did not call for action plans” specifically, noting that it was several years later that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan put out the call.

Nonsense, retorts Diana Sarosi, policy manager for the Nobel group. Security Council resolutions are binding, so Canada should have come up with a plan in 2000, rather than waiting until Annan prodded laggards with a call for action in 2005, she says.

Even then, “it still took five years,” she adds.