European Parliament Hearing: The Situation of Women in Armed Conflicts in the Context of Security Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security
Briefing by Janet Benshoof, President of Global Justice Center.
Thank you. It is an honor to address this body. The EU, unquestionably, is the global leader in advancing international law and women’s equality.
As we sit here today, over 200 Christian Chibok schoolgirls are waking up to their 548th day of dehumanizing sexual degradation by their Boko Haram slave masters. So too, ISIS continues expanding its genocidal hell; enslaving Yazidi and Christian girls and women in Iraq and Syria for a lifetime of “religiously” justified rape, even of prepubescent young girls, of forced impregnation, forced marriage, and forced conversion.
What happened to 1325? Where is the Responsibility to Protect? Where is the Genocide Convention?
The Security Council has passed 1325 and seven additional resolutions to stop the rampant rape of women and girls in armed conflicts and to rectify peacekeeping and post conflict inequality. The very fact that the UN Security Council regularly examines the impact of today’s armed conflict on women is a sea change for women’s rights. Progress has been made on 1325 goals but not on its central goal: mass rape of women and girls continues as the weapon of choice in a third of today’s armed conflicts. This does not mean 1325 is at fault. The reasons states and the UN working together, have failed to stop rape in war lie elsewhere.
The Security Council’s competency to pass 1325 is based in its mandate to stop gross violations of international humanitarian law, or the Geneva Conventions for shorthand, as threats to international peace and security. The Secretary-General’s first report to the Council on 1325 in 2002 was unequivocal: to stop rape in war, the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocols, must be enforced by all states without discrimination against women.