PK

Protecting women from attacks and holding accountable those who commit these abuses need to be essential components of brokering peace, whether in our resolutions, in mediation processes or in peace operations. We have seen and we live every day how challenging this is. One place for members of the Security Council to start is to make certain that all components of the United Nations system do their utmost to keep women in conflicts safe. That is why the United States will continue to demand that peacekeeping missions carry out their mandates to protect civilians and why the Secretary-General must ensure, as he recommitted to again today and as stipulated in resolution 2272 (2016), that when there is credible evidence of widespread or systematic sexual exploitation and abuse by a peacekeeping unit, that unit is swiftly repatriated. Zero tolerance must come to mean zero tolerance.