Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

The United Nations Team of Experts plays an important role in that regard, serving as a ready resource for national authorities in their efforts to strengthen the rule-of-law response to sexual violence. That is proving to be an innovative and valuable tool for Governments, and should be further reinforced.

The draft resolution to be adopted by the Council today consolidates that approach.

The draft resolution places emphasis on a more consistent and rigorous investigation and prosecution of sexual violence crimes as a central aspect of deterrence and, ultimately, prevention. Essentially, we must raise the cost and consequences for those who commit such crimes.

The draft resolution emphasizes the need for comprehensive and multidimensional strategies for us to meet our obligations to the survivors of sexual violence — the critical health, psychosocial, legal and other interventions that they must have to rebuild their lives.

The draft resolution emphasizes that sexual violence must be specifically reflected in other critical peace and security processes and arrangements, such as security sector reform and disarmament, demobilization and reintegration processes. That includes ensuring that those who commit, command or condone sexual violence be vetted and excluded from positions of influence and power.

That is why the theme of today's debate — combating impunity for sexual violence — is of the utmost relevance and urgency. By focusing on impunity, we make a more concerted effort to put the spotlight on the perpetrators, that is, on those who commit, or command, or condone sexual violence in conflicts. In so doing, we begin to re-direct the stigma and the consequences of sexual violence from the survivors to the perpetrators.

Since taking office, in September 2012, I have placed particular emphasis on engaging national stakeholders in order to foster national ownership, leadership and responsibility.

Over the course of five years, we have seen significant progress at the political level, advances led largely by the Security Council.

In their day-to-day lives, survivors of sexual violence are forced to face the men who raped them — in banks, in supermarkets and at the schools of their children, children whose “inheritance” is the stigma of sexual violence, many of whom are offspring born of rape.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the guns may have fallen silent 20 years ago, but for the survivors of sexual violence the war has not ended. Their battle continues as they struggle with physical and psychological injuries, stigma and isolation, poverty and destitution. That is what I have witnessed in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in many other countries devastated by war.