Thank you very much.
First let me stress again how much I agree with the necessity to focus on the empowerment of women and not just the victimization of women. I think that side of UN resolution 1325 has in some cases been overemphasized.
On the issue of empowerment, I think we need to talk seriously about real power, not just cosmetic power or the appearance of power. Giving women seats at negotiation tables when they have nothing to deliver as part of structuring a peace deal or a post-reconstruction framework--when they don't have weapons to surrender, when they don't have money to bring, when they don't have a constituency that speaks loudly behind them--is more cosmetic than real in terms of trying to create a space for the empowerment of women. That's the trap I'm afraid we have fallen into in allegedly “bringing women to the negotiation tables”, but not as power brokers or power holders.
Conflict is about power and fuel for power. The realities in modern armed conflict are the same as they've always been: money and weapons. For the most part, women have neither. That is the reality. I think we have to speak very frankly about what we mean by the empowerment of women and how some of it, at times, is not empowerment. That's why it doesn't have much impact on the ground.
On the question of human trafficking, I haven't looked at that issue since I left my post as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, where considerable work was done on human trafficking, and particularly on the trafficking of women and girls. A lot of it is endemic and doesn't take place just in conflict situations. It may be aggravated by conflict that causes migration to become an issue. Displacement inevitably is a fertile ground for trafficking. People are anxious to leave; they flee, and then they will look at all kinds of opportunities, many of them illegal. They therefore fall prey to the trafficking very rapidly.
I think it's important to recognize that human trafficking is also linked, in many parts of the world, to the lack of opportunities for economic migration. For a long time we've had a functioning system of protection for political migrants under the convention to protect refugees, but we don't have an international framework to really guarantee and ensure the proper protection of economic migrants. I think the question of human trafficking is able to thrive in that kind of environment.
Thank you.