 Just to give a little bit of context of tonight's event, underlying causes and possible prevention strategies, this event is a second in a series of events that the ICRC and others will be convening throughout 2016 to focus the attention on ways in which we can better generate respect for international law and armed conflict. This event is, of course, also, as I mentioned, the launch of the International Review of the Red Cross dedicated to the topic of sexual violence and armed conflict. What we wanted to highlight both in the journal and to put front and center in tonight's event is that, whereas sexual violence is a prevalent phenomenon, it is not an inevitable consequence of warfare. It can, and we must work to prevent it. This year we want, of course, to focus more specifically on how to prevent perpetration by armed forces, whether they are state or professional actors or non-state actors. But before doing so, I just wanted to remind us a little about how little we know about how to prevent sexual violence in general. Now, Maria said we learned a lot, and it's true we learned a lot. Twenty years ago, when we had the first devastating numbers coming out of Rwanda and then out of Exegoslavia, Rwanda saying, and what did the numbers mean, between 100 and 250,000 women were raped. Well, that gives you a range, but it doesn't, just means it was massive. We don't know how many people really were affected. And in Rwanda we say about 60,000 women were raped in a massive and systematic way between 1992 and 1995. So these were the first times where this came really to the attention of, I would say, worldwide leaders. And since then a lot has happened in terms of political attention, high-level political attention, development of legal instruments, humanitarian organizations starting to take this much more seriously. But we're still at the beginning of understanding why this really happens and also what to do about it in terms of support, but in particular also in terms of prevention. The first and most important finding is that not all armed organizations engage in significant levels of rape of civilians. Frequency varies very, very sharply. So some organizations engage in very little rape. So the insurgencies in Sri Lanka and in El Salvador examples or the present ethnic conflict between Israel and Palestine is another example, at least in recent years. Of course, in other settings we see quite massive levels of rape on the part of armed organizations. So that's the puzzle. If we can show, I think we've done, that some groups do not engage in rape, then it is not the case that it is an inevitable aspect of war. And so because some armed groups of organizations don't engage in it, we have several reasons to hold accountable for those groups that do engage in widespread rape. The second reason is that if we understand the causes of different forms of sexual violence during war, that may help us to define effective points of intervention during war, not just after war. The prevention activities that is undertaken in peacekeeping operations primarily forms part of the protection of civilians' umbrella and also with specific emphasis on protection of women and girls because they are the ones who are actually disproportionately affected by this crime. We have many good examples that comes out of the peacekeeping operations. The first one is carrying out hotspot mapping to identify which are the vulnerable areas and also who are the vulnerable sections of the society. So that hotspot mapping guides you for a deployment which is able to respond to emerging threats and challenges. He later engagements have been another good practice in all the places. We have been able to do it in Mali and Central African Republic and weekly security meetings including with the women and girls have been found very useful. Active patrolling in vulnerable areas and also deployment of mobile columns have also displaced the armed groups from the area and escorting women and girls into livelihood activities or economic activities have also been very effective. The Joint Operations Center and Joint Mission Analysis Center have also been able to actually gain good understanding of the armed groups and the other groups operating in this area through profiling and understanding their motives and intentions. Having said all this, it is very important that the peacekeepers have necessary motivation and commitment to execute this mandate and also the will and commitment of the leadership is also very essential. The human rights due diligence policy application has also facilitated closer working together with the host military forces where we have been able to influence their behaviour and posture and they have been made to be more responsible and accountable towards women and girls. Training and mentoring of these forces including military and police has been also one of the best practices. We do direct engagement with the armed non-state actors and we work on their accountability to respect IHL. So one of the tools we use because we have several ones but one of them is the deed of commitment. We have three one focuses on the prohibition of sexual violence and the elimination of gender discrimination. So the particularity of this one one is that it goes I would say a bit beyond IHL because it focuses on sexual violence and not only rape so we include all forms of sexual violence. Secondly, the core articles, three of them are negative obligations and they really focus on the prohibition of sexual violence what cannot be done. One article is about positive obligation in terms of assistance to victims of sexual violence and the two other articles which are related to the elimination of gender discrimination are positive obligations. And then we do work with armed groups on the implementation of the deed of commitment so one needs to be adjusted in terms of policy practices, doctrines so we work on a plan and then we support them in the implementation of this plan and then we do the monitoring of the deed of commitment. So it's a very long process and it takes time and it's all based on confidence between GDVACOL the constituencies and the armed groups. Other successes we have groups in Africa, in the Congo I have to mention Congo which didn't have sexual prohibition in the Code of Conduct and they did accept to include some provisions related to sexual violence and to assistance of victims of sexual violence. So these are some positive achievements and we need to monitor now. Another entry point is the monitoring of the deed of commitments because we don't monitor only the breach of the deed of commitment but also the good practices and it's good to congratulate armed groups, officers when they do good, when they change in a good way, when there is no violation it's also good and it's again, it's a good entry point to pursue to continue the discussion. It remains the unfortunate and very sad reality that when we think of sexual violence under its very diverse manifestation that include rape and many other forms of sexual violence accountability remains the exception and really impunity is the rule when we look across situation and especially in situation of armed conflict if we seriously want to prevent sexual violence during armed conflict we need to also make sure that there is a way of addressing sexual violence and rapes committed outside and before armed conflict and to do that we really need to make sure that we prevent before conflict and that we really build very resilient criminal justice system that more systematically investigate and prosecute sexual violence and rapes under all its form and it is only once we will have built those systems that really address the root causes and not only the symptoms that address the root causes that are really entrenched gender stereotyping and the vulnerability of women in far too many societies that we will really be able to build more resilient system that can hopefully contain the occurrence of sexual violence during armed conflict. If we're really serious about preventing sexual violence as well as sexual crimes we really need to take the issue from very multifaceted way and really bring different disciplines together so that we better understand the phenomenon and also better understand what are the few avenues available to try to prevent it. I really hope that we will continue the discussion on how access to remedy can really be improved. I think that we really need to centre the debate and continue to centre the debate around the survivors, the victims themselves. And ideally in a future panel what would be fantastic is that you bring also survivors themselves so that we hear their experience and not only them recounting their trauma but in fact really tell us from their own perspective what has worked what is crucial, what they see as key step. My name is Munna. I am a general practitioner from Yemen. I work for ICRC, Subdelegation Aden. I work with ICRC since almost two years now. One of the interesting things was for me to know that not only conservative countries or conservative communities who are having this problem of hiding the sexual violence issue it's like worldwide, it's everywhere and all victims are facing the same problems like being stigmatised and being afraid to proceed with the legal side or just report or talk about what they have faced. So it was, I can't say it's a positive thing but for me it was good to know that we are not the only Middle East countries who are facing this problem. My name is Anne. I work in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya and I work as a refugee status determination associate where we basically interview asylum seekers who come from all places like for example Mosta from South Sudanese, Somalis, Congolese, Burundians, Ugandans and my work purely is to interview them on their claim on their refugee claim and then recommend whether they should be granted asylum refugee status in Kenya or not. I chose to pursue this course because I wanted to learn more about how I get to meet so many of them especially being the focal point person of LGBTI which is a bit complex because you're interviewing someone on their sexuality and I wanted to understand how to interview them better how to get them to express themselves better and also how to assist them better because like for example I didn't, which I've come to learn in this course or I came to realise is that we don't really focus on men who have gone through sexual violence and we focus mainly on LGBTI like homosexuals that is the only gender-based violence that we mainly focus on but that doesn't mean that we don't have men who go through say for example sexual violence or who have domestic violence but we don't have specifically a programme targeting them so for me I applied for this course to understand better the whole sexual violence in armed conflict area and to know how to deal with such cases better