Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

Of the over 2 million refugees from Syria today, 78 per cent are women and girls. Having fled the violence in Syria, they are attempting to navigate a tidal wave of new threats – sexual violence, mass forced displacement, early and forced marriage, forced pregnancies and exploitation.

Of course, ensuring women and girls' safety and security in conflict is instrumental to laying the ground for gender equality initiatives. We look forward to the contribution that implementation of the Arms Trade Treaty can make to reducing gender-based violence in conflict settings, and we strongly encourage its ratification.

Local justice remains critical to the long-term healing and the reconciliation of communities, and affected States need to ensure accountability for conflict-related crimes. But to be effective, this must include justice for crimes of sexual violence.

We also believe that without women's civil society strength and women's leadership, there will be no effective prevention. Women's experiences of violence during and after conflict are much broader, and effective protection from all forms of violence and violations will be possible only through their empowerment and participation.

Finally, I would like to share the sentiments expressed in 2012 by a group of women Nobel Peace Prize laureates — Jody Williams, Shirin Ebadi, Mairead Maguire and Leymah Gbowee — that a world without war and violence against women is possible and that “[o]ur collective efforts have brought gender violence to the forefront of policy and public discussions. Now, our united actions will stop rape in conflict”.

Argentina would like to emhasize the need for a gender perspective and for crimes against women to be incorporated into the agenda of peace negotiations. To that end, we need women in decision-making positions and at all stages of the peace process. We know that women are victims of widespread violence at the hands of all parties involved in a conflict.

"It is true that much remains to be done.

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 African Union takes cognizance of its member States' international commitments in respect of women's rights, most notably Security Council resolutions on women, peace and security, and thus acknowledges and supports the efforts of those African States and regional bodies that have taken concrete steps towards implementing those resolutions.

The African Union reaffirms its support for the advancement of holistic justice for women in situations of conflict, post-conflict, political violence and gross human rights violations. African Union documents, such as the Constitutive Act, enshrine a commitment to the advancement of gender equality and the protection of women from gender-based and other forms of violence.