General Women, Peace and Security

Let us be clear about what it is we are saying by our inaction. We are saying that it is okay by us when a United Nations civilian staff member commits rape in a United Nations peacekeeping mission, where the host country has no functioning judiciary and when the country of nationality cannot exercise its criminal jurisdiction extraterritorially over the accused because it has no law allowing it to do so. Is that our view?

I do not wish to be misunderstood: if we had done everything we should have done over the past nine years to ensure the total elimination of this abominable practice by our own peacekeepers, and they still occurred, then we could accept that there was little more we can do. But we, as Member States, have not done everything, and so we cannot make that claim.

Finally, I ask once again the painful question of whether we as a collective membership, bound together in this Organization by its Charter, actually have the credibility to offer strong opinions on this subject matter?

We must all strive to be as innovative as we can in motivating national leaders to adopt the agenda of women and peace and security as their own. We must be more ambitious in addressing the root causes of sexual violence in conflict — women's second-class status and the culture of impunity. And we must seek to promote women's political and economic empowerment as crucial to the long-term prevention of sexual violence.

Last September's Declaration of Commitment to End Sexual Violence in Conflict was endorsed by 145 countries, and the United Kingdom will continue its leadership on the issue with a global summit to be convened in June. The Secretary-General has rightly concluded that at the global level there is now unprecedented commitment and momentum for decisively addressing the scourge of sexual violence in combat.

While we applaud the evolvement of a global normative framework on sexual violence in armed conflict, not least through the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, resolution 1325 (2000) and others, it is a tragic fact that citizens, particularly women, in large numbers continue to be victimized in conflicts.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, impunity with respect to mass rapes has long been the rule. There has recently been a degree of progress. That is why we call upon the Congolese authorities to pursue their efforts to prosecute those responsible for the rapes in Minova, including the commanders of the Forces armées de la République démocratique du Congo, with the necessary rigour.

In a second success, shame has changed sides. It now weighs on the executioner and not on the victim. The Secretary-General's list of shame exposes to the whole international community the parties that are using sexual violence in an orchestrated and systematic manner and provides United Nations missions with a solid basis for initiating a dialogue with such groups.

Sexual violence is a weapon as old as war itself. Thanks to the action of civil society, our Council has been seized of the matter and broken the complicit silence that has surrounded that abominable crime. However, this is not the time to celebrate. We have failed to protect civilians in Syria. Women, men and children are being sexually abused there, even as we speak.

Before concluding, I would like to add one point that remains important for France. In peacetime, but even more so during war, access to sexual and reproductive health services is indispensable. We know that women and girls exposed to sexual violence run the risk of premature and unwanted pregnancies.