Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on March 24th, 2011

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

Good afternoon.

This is the Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development. Today we are holding our 52^nd meeting.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we are looking into sexual assault on women and children during peacekeeping operations in fragile states and in situations of conflict.

We are fortunate to have with us today by video conference from New York, Margot Wallström, who is the special representative of the secretary-general of the United Nations on sexual violence in conflict.

Ms. Wallström, our normal practice is that you give your presentation and then we'll go to questions from the members. I would invite you to begin whenever you wish.

[Margot Wallström, Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, United Nations]

Thank you, honourable members of Parliament, for giving me this opportunity, although from a distance. I would prefer to be there in person, but since I'm travelling a lot, it is not possible this time. Thank you for allowing me to participate through video conference.

Allow me to put this in a bigger picture. As you heard, I'm the first one to hold this post, the secretary-general's special representative on conflict-related sexual violence.

Why are we talking about this? I would say it's because of the changing nature of war. We have traditionally thought of war as a conflict between two well-disciplined and well-trained armies on the battlefield, but this is no longer the common feature. Modern wars and conflicts are often in failed states, or they are civil wars; they are intra-state. They are often carried out by armed groups that are difficult to control. This has left women and children, that is, civilians, on the front line not as armed soldiers but as victims.

Today most of the victims in fact are civilians. It is very important to understand this phenomenon. Historically, it is actually described in the Bible. In stories about the Trojan War, we can read about virgins being a war prize. It could seem that this is something inevitable, but it is not. It is important to understand that first and foremost.

It has been referred to as history's greatest silence. It is still surrounded by silence and, I would say, shame. Unfortunately, the shame falls on the victims, not the perpetrators.

This issue is important and is being placed on the Security Council's agenda because it is such a heavy impediment to building a sustainable peace. It undermines social security and destroys families and society. It also prevents women's participation in economic activities and often prevents girls from going to school. The trust in the construction of a country's justice system and a state's ability to protect its citizens are also undermined. It's a very serious phenomenon.

We have seen it recently being used as a political tool to punish political opponents. We've seen this in Kenya. We saw it in Conakry, Guinea. We are seeing it now in Côte d'Ivoire. It was acknowledged 10 years ago by Security Council Resolution 1325, which framed it as a resolution on women, peace and security, giving women a particular role when it comes to war and peace and peace-building. Since then, we've had a number of follow-up resolutions which mention specifically sexual violence as a weapon of war or a tactic in modern warfare.

Last year the resolution that set up my post was adopted by the Security Council. Last December, Resolution 1960 gave my team and me access to the tools we need. That is, the Security Council said that it is willing to use all the tools available, including such things as sanctions, the freezing of assets and visa bans to prevent rapists from having a political, military, or civil career. That is extremely important.

In closing, I have set an agenda for myself with five points.

Number one is to end impunity. These types of crimes have been met with total impunity and amnesty. We need to empower women, and that goes hand in hand with fighting impunity. We have to create the political ownership of this issue for both women and men. It is not solely a women's issue. It is a human rights issue. We have to rethink rape as a tactic of war. We have to understand the phenomenon better. We have to harmonize and coordinate better within the UN system because today, the majority of the mandates for our peacekeeping missions contain a paragraph about protecting civilians. Civilians are men and women, but women have their particular needs and it has to be designed that way. This is what we are doing.

We have also identified seven focus countries. We have to engage more long term and in a deeper way with a number of countries. Five of them are in Africa. But this is not a cultural problem; it has also occurred in Europe, as we know from the war in the Balkans. Bosnia-Herzegovina is one of our focus countries, as is Colombia. But the five countries in Africa are: Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Côte d'Ivoire, Sudan, and Liberia, a supposed conflict country. This is also something that we need to follow up to see how it affects a country long term.

We are working full speed to make sure this is an advocacy task, to make sure there is better knowledge and better awareness of this phenomenon. You can be sure it is also part of what is going on now in northern Africa, unfortunately. This will remain a very heavy impediment on restoring sustainable peace, which is why I am grateful that you and your committee have supported it on your agenda.

I'll answer any questions you may have.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

Thank you very much.

We have a reasonable amount of time here, so what I would suggest, members, is I will set the clock at nine minutes for questions and answers. If we have time left over, we'll see if anybody has supplemental questions and we may have time to do one or two questions for those who have had particular issues raised by the first round.

With that in mind, Mr. Silva, would you like to begin?

[Mario Silva, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Mr. Chair, first of all, I want to thank the special representative of the secretary-general. I had an opportunity to look at some of the recommendations that you put forward, Ms. Wallström, and I suggested your name as a witness to this committee. I am glad that you are before this committee on this very important debate we are having on the issue of sexual assault on women and children during peacekeeping operations in fragile states and in situations of conflict.

I think you set it out correctly by talking about the changing nature of war, which is now affecting civilians, not soldiers any longer, as it was in historical times. You listed five countries specifically in Africa where post-conflict rebuilding is taking place.

Maybe you could give us an assessment of what is happening on the ground. Are things improving or not improving? I am also concerned about sexual violence in terms of displaced persons in some of the camps. What is the UN doing to deal with that issue?

Could you give us an analysis of some of the initiatives that are taking place and whether you have seen progress? Are some of the initiatives that are taking place, not just by the UN but also by western countries, having much of an impact?

[Margot Wallström]

Thank you very much, Mr. Silva, for that question.

I don't think we are capable of answering in an authoritative way whether things are improving or not because we are only now starting to monitor and report on this particular phenomenon.

It comes with war and conflict, of course. When I visited the Democratic Republic of Congo, women said repeatedly, “if it were not for the war”. They see the things that have come--and we've seen this in Liberia--as a phenomenon that has been introduced during a war or a conflict situation. Things such as gang rapes or very, very brutal sexual violence, unfortunately stay in the society after the guns have fallen silent, as in Liberia. Assaults on children and gang rape, which were unknown before the war, are crimes which are still occurring. Rape is the number one reported crime there still. It affects society in a very deep way.

I think that where there is active conflict, this is still being used. The new phenomenon is that it has been used to punish, I mean in the political context, in connection with elections. In Angola we have seen it as a phenomenon with the expulsion of illegal migrants.

This is why I don't think anybody can give you a really clear answer as to whether or not it is improving. We are hoping that the attention this issue is being given, and the fact that the media are reporting and there is more political will will help us to improve the situation. I think impunity is at the core of all of this. If it continues with almost total impunity and there are no risks involved in doing this to women, then I don't think we will be able to tackle it properly.

With camps and the problems of IDPs, internally displaced persons, we made an inventory of what are the best peacekeeping practices. A lot has been done ad hoc and on the ground in a number of countries. We put the information together in an inventory which was presented last year. Now we are following up with the training of peacekeepers to make sure they can protect civilians effectively, using these methods. That includes everything from joint protection teams engaging with civil society, to having more fuel-efficient stoves so that women don't have to walk so far to get firewood or water. The women are accompanied to the market or to the water well. That has also been proven to be effective.

The whole design of camp areas is also very important. Women need particular protection. They need to have separate showers. They need to have all their needs met. I think that is being done sort of step by step. There is a better understanding of those needs. But it is not perfect, as we have seen from Haiti, for example, where this continues to be a huge challenge and there are a lot of problems with sexual harassment and rape.

[Mario Silva, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

I have a brief question before I turn it over to Professor Irwin Cotler.

You do have an obligation and a responsibility to call out those who are committing these types of atrocities, including leaders of certain countries. We talk a great deal about impunity, and I agree with you totally on that, but we can't allow these people to get away with it.

As a special adviser you have a responsibility, I believe, to call out those people who are committing these particular crimes.

[Margot Wallström]

Exactly. This is what I got by Resolution 1960, which was adopted in December by the Security Council. I now have that tool available to me so that I can name them and shame them. We can list them. We can engage with different armed groups in order to get commitments from them so they can avoid being listed. That includes sanctions also. Until now this was only done for those who committed sexual violence against children. There was an artificial divide between children and grown-ups, and we got rid of this with Resolution 1960.

Now we are making sure we have a monitoring and reporting system and that we can also do the listing and the naming and shaming. That's correct.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

Unfortunately, we only have two minutes left in this round.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

I'll be very brief and I'll deal exactly with this point, because I appreciate the importance you gave to combatting impunity, your reference in that regard to the listing mechanism, UN Security Council Resolution 1960. I know Sudan is one of your two priority countries.

Given that the vote has been for independence in southern Sudan, there's been talk about waiving the indictment against President al-Bashir, or another one of the Sudanese leaders, Ahmad Harun, who have been indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. In other words, in order to further good relations between the north and the south, we should waive or ignore these indictments. What is your view on that? Would you regard waiving such indictments really as defaulting on the struggle against impunity?

[Margot Wallström]

I trust, a lot, the work of the International Criminal Court. It's extremely important that we work with the criminal court in the Hague. I am already cooperating with the ICC and, of course, they are calling for Mr. al-Bashir, so I would trust them on this. It would be unfortunate if, again, they were let off the hook. I personally wouldn't like to see that. It's very important that, in all the cases that are in front of the ICC at the moment, this is one of the elements they are accused of, including Jean-Pierre Bemba, including Mr. al-Bashir. It's very important to follow up and follow it through, also legally. To me, fighting impunity is core to any success on this issue.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Thank you. I appreciate your commitment in this regard.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

If we stay on schedule, we should have time for an additional question or two. Perhaps we could return to you then, Professor.

Madame Deschamps, s'il vous plaît.

[Johanne Deschamps, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I am going to address you in French, Ms. Wallström. First, I would like to thank you for joining us to talk about your mission. It's a relatively new position, since it was just created last year, and you mentioned this in your remarks. You also told us that the resolution—the number escapes me at the moment—gave you tools to prevent perpetrators from committing their offences. You also mentioned five objectives.

I would like to know what you are doing to attain these objectives. How are you managing to coordinate your efforts and your work, given the presence of civil society organizations on the ground in the countries where these conflicts and actions are being committed? How can you have some influence on the government?

Early in the week, we had a representative from an NGO who is currently working in Sudan on the situation with women. She was trying to have changes made to the legislation that does not recognize the rape or assault of women as being criminal offences. It is very difficult for them because they have little or no access to the government. So they are working with the civil society, with the women in the north and south. It is very difficult for them to put pressure on the government. What would be your role with these women?

You also mentioned that you are working with seven countries, or that you have targeted seven countries, five of them in Africa. We are talking about countries in conflict or countries that have been affected by a serious earthquake. For example, the case of Haiti. How are you working with the women in Haiti, particularly women in refugee camps where it appears that there is a great deal of violence against women?

[Margot Wallström]

Thank you very much, Ms. Deschamps.

With respect to how my team and I work, there are nine people in total in my team. We are working politically. We are working within the UN system to influence everything from how mandates are formulated to how our peacekeepers are working on the ground. It's a very political role. Also, as you might know, this is my background.

It is my obligation to engage with governments, and I always aim for the highest level. I try to meet with presidents, prime ministers, and government ministers to mobilize them and to work with them on these issues. For example, the last time I visited the DRC, I managed to get a long meeting with President Kabila.

It is extremely important that we create political accountability and ownership of this issue. Without the work of NGOs and civil society organizations, we wouldn't know that much about this whole issue. We are dependent on, and indeed are very encouraged by, the work that NGO and civil society organizations are doing. They are also helping us to report about what happens on the ground.

I agree with you that the situation in Sudan is extremely difficult, as we learned from meeting with Sudanese government representatives. They underlined that they take rape so seriously that actually four witnesses--four male witnesses--are needed in order to report a rape. Of course, this means that no rapes will be reported because very rarely will there be four witnesses to report on such a crime.

You are also correct in describing the challenges in Haiti. We have to decide how to engage, because it is not really a conflict-related situation for me and my team. The whole UN system is engaged in finding solutions. It also engages with donor countries and others, the organizations that are active on the ground, to see how they can prevent sexual violence and rapes from happening.

I think that includes a lot of solutions, from patrolling during the night and making sure they are let into the camps to do more policing and monitoring of the situation with the possibility of intervening. There are more civil criminal elements who are raping women and children in Haiti. For me and my team, Haiti has not been given to us as a priority country, but of course we are keeping an eye on the situation. We are trying to collect as much information as possible from all areas in the world where sexual violence is used.

[Johanne Deschamps, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

I will come back later, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

Mr. Marston, then, please.

[Wayne Marston, NDP, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Madam, I want to commend you on taking up the challenge of this problem and your decision to help confront this horrendous crime against human dignity. The task today is quite huge, quite daunting.

I'm also pleased, though, to hear from you that you have a number of tools at your disposal that have not been there in the past. I'm of the opinion that historically, the countries you have named have been in conflict for generations now. What's very troubling for me is that it seems to be quite clear that the institutional memory of those countries is starting to accept that sexual assault is somehow acceptable in itself, both during and after the conflicts.

In the context of where we are in the world right now, when we see the situation that's happening in Libya, I'm heartened in a way, because part of what's purported to be coming to the fore in the situation in Libya via the United Nations is a sense of the responsibility to protect innocent non-combatant citizens.

I'm wondering if you see that sense of responsibility spreading into the area of sexual assault. In countries where this appears to be part of the culture at this point, are there religious organizations that have taken a stand against this practice, or are they somehow condoning it?

[Margot Wallström]

These are two very relevant and important questions.

Has sexual violence also become accepted in post-conflict situations? Certainly, it has lived on in post-conflict situations, and this has deeply affected those societies in countries that have experienced long civil wars. Of course, it will never be the same in a country where many young people have been recruited as child soldiers, for example, and maybe have had to rape a family member, a mother or a sister, and then have had to kill their mother or sister in front of their other family members and their villages, or perform other violent acts against their family members. This lives on for generations.

It is also important to see progress. The Security Council has decided this is part of the peace and security agenda. This is something they are willing to use all their weaponry to fight. We've also had these resolutions pointing to solutions. We are formulating protection of civilians in almost all the new mandates for peacekeepers. We are training peacekeepers. We are doing so much more in recognizing this as a plague and something we have to deal with.

I think you have both, but it has to do with the role of women and the respect for human rights. It is important to see this not solely as a women's issue, as I said before. It's a human rights issue. It is not cultural. It is not even sexual. It's criminal, and that is how we have to treat it.

You are also right in acknowledging the role of religious leaders. They are engaging more and more. We are also able to mobilize more men in the fight against sexual violence. So far this has been very problematic, because women carry the shame and the stigma of having been victims of sexual violence. Very often they are not allowed back into their families or their communities. They are extremely traumatized by this. We are also trying to reach out to religious leaders, to community and village leaders, to discuss with them what they can do to deal with the problem of the stigma. We have not been that successful in doing so yet, but we are continuing to target religious organizations because they play a pivotal role in many of those countries.

[Wayne Marston, NDP, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

I think it was a year and a half ago that this committee did a study on the case of Omar Khadr, who was a child combatant. I'm sure you're aware of the case. We heard testimony about the kinds of things that were forced upon child soldiers, particularly on many who had been in Africa, in Sierra Leone, and places of that nature. You can understand that at the end of the situation the victims of the sexual assault have post-traumatic stress and all the complications of that mentally, plus the societal problems they face. In addition, the perpetrators will face horrendous guilt at some point in their lives; at some point they will address this in their own lives.

Until society as a whole in these countries not only accepts responsibility and stops that sexual assault and deems it to be the horrendous crime it is and comes to terms with addressing both the victims and the perpetrators, it will be a very difficult situation to change. It seems to me there's a horrendous need for on-the-ground education and understanding.

[Margot Wallström]

This is a huge challenge for the international community and also for donor countries. For example, in Liberia there is not one psychiatrist in the whole country. One can understand the need for psychosocial counselling and so on in dealing with the trauma from a very long civil war. They don't have any forensic expertise. They have asked us to look into this to see if we can assist, if we can mobilize donors and others to look into that and help them.

It is also important to learn from this post-conflict situation. We have to acknowledge this as a phenomenon that needs to be dealt with. Maybe sometimes we move too quickly into development, saying that once a war is over we can go on as if everything has been taken care of. We have to look into the psychosocial needs of the population, and in particular the child soldiers, and the traumas that have been experienced by the population. I can only agree with you.

[Wayne Marston, NDP, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

We're starting with Mr. Sweet, and then we'll go to Mr. Hiebert.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair. Thank you Madam Wallström.

I have two questions, and my colleague has some questions.

The first one is with regard to Mr. Cotler's concern about impunity. The subject of naming and shaming the perpetrators came up. I'm just wondering what level of mandate you have. Do you name the countries where the impunity is happening? Do you have a mandate to name the political parties? You mentioned that it was used by political parties to punish those who would run against them. To what level can you actually name as you gather evidence?

[Margot Wallström]

That's a good question. The mandate given to us in resolution 1960 is to name and shame, as has been done for these types of crimes committed against the underaged, that is, for sexual violence against children. That is for individuals and also for armed groups, militias or armies. Those are the ones we target. This has already been done. For example, there was mention of the famous, or should I say infamous, blacklist from the DRC. They are individuals, but we can also engage with armed groups, including national armies.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

You could name a captain, a lieutenant or a general if you found evidence that he was actually commissioning troops to do such a thing. Do you have such a list right now?