Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Thank you very much, honourable members.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes. Unfortunately, this is the experience in these countries. The LRA also very often takes sex slaves. What you are saying is important. This is being done to men and boys as well as to women. It's useless to try to compare their suffering, but the stigma is also enormously strong for boys and men.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I hope what we do will be long term, that we can keep these issues on the agenda of the Security Council, and that it will continue to be identified as a security issue. It is important for member states to decide in their bilateral programs, in their aid programs, how this is being addressed and if sexual violence is explicitly mentioned.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  The last question is also a very important one. I have to think, so I can answer it in a serious and correct way. Of course, it depends on circumstances, but very often a child's, and especially a young girl's, life opportunities are hampered by being exposed to something like this.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Thank you very much for that question. It's an opportunity for me to say that I hope other countries will follow the example of having a national action plan as the implementation or the follow-up to Resolution 1325. I have to be very honest with you and say that I don't know your national action plan by heart, but I know from contacts with Canadians here in New York and everywhere I've been that you've been extremely helpful.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  That's an invitation for me to say that I always think that member states can do even more. I think the elements of Resolution 1325 are very good. In particular, an extremely important part of it is the participation and representation of women. We can always do more in prevention.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  For example, one of the things that we have seen as extremely important is more women police, more women peacekeepers. I would add one more element that I did not mention in my introduction, and that is the whole issue of conflict minerals. For example, in the DRC, there's the extraction of coltan and tungsten, rare minerals that are used in mobile phones.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  In most of these countries there is already a normative framework which is good enough, one could say. They very often have ambitious legislation against rape. They have the laws and the rules are there, but it's a matter of implementing of them. Unfortunately in the DRC, as you might know, they were not happy with my repeating the notion that the DRC was the rape capital of the world.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  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.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  We are working on our list. This has been done already when it comes to sexual violence against children. We have experience working with those types of lists. We need first to establish a monitoring and reporting system so that we have reliable data. Until now we have not had that, but this is exactly the mandate we were given in December.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  As you know, in the UN we are very specialized. There are those who work on IDPs, on camps and on the design of the camps. I think this is still developing. This is not my direct task, but of course we are looking into this and the phenomenon of sexual violence being used in connection with, for example, expulsions of people who are in and around these camps.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  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.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  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.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  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.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  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.