 This is the last plenary of the day, and it is going to be very lively. I'm challenging my colleagues here. Now it really is going to be, and it's going to be very engaging with you, the audience. This is called key takeaways, gaps and priorities for research, policy and practice to end conflict related sexual violence. And so we are very lucky and honored to welcome back to the US Institute of Peace. I think the last time you gave a speech here, it was in 2015 on feminist foreign policy. Remember that? Anyway, so I am very pleased to welcome to the podium here Marco Volstrum. She's the former UN special rep on sexual violence in conflict. And she's also the former minister of foreign affairs of Sweden. She is a friend to all. She has taken up the issue of CRSV in a way that is global and persistent. That's what I think of you, Marco. Persistence in all your leadership. Thank you for coming back. Thank you for joining us for these two days. The floor is yours and then we'll invite your panel up. Thank you. Thank you so much. And I would like to start by saying warm thanks to Kathleen and her team. We have come together in very dark times. That's almost banal to say that we live in perilous times. But you are providing a safe spot for us here. A safe place. We have made and found all the new friends here. And kindness. A common goal. And also very constructive ideas. And that means something. This is so important in those days that we can meet. So thank you so much Kathleen and your team that you're having us here. I think we should give her and the USIP and Lisa of course an applause. I will encourage throughout people to do applause. I like that. I think we can move around a little. So this is of course what an opportunity to make sure that during this particular session that we can take stock. We can discuss what did we learn during these first two days. There is another day tomorrow of course. But what will we take away from here. And I will soon present the panel and I will ask them if they can maybe give us a to-do list. I'm fond of to-do lists. So what would their short or longer to-do lists from now on. What would it look like. My own to-do list. And I will just say a few words about that. Of course justice is at the core of this. We are still fighting impunity for these types of crimes. And as I said yesterday we are in the different situations that we have like in Ethiopia or other countries around the world. Women are still not there. They are not invited and it means that impunity for these types of crimes can continue. So the whole judicial process to define what justice is also in a broader aspect has been in one of the previous sessions was about that. And I think that this is definitely something that we will have to continue to work on. I would say more money in the hands of women. More money in the hands of women. Would you believe it? Robina, am I pronouncing your name right? Robina said that fifty dollars meant a lot to women where she comes from, where she is active. Meanwhile the world spends more than two trillion dollars on militarization. Two trillion dollars. Go to buying more weapons or modernize the weaponry that we have. I truly believe in also smaller projects like the one we've heard of. And if you put more money in the hands of women we know that we'll go to feeding children or building sustainable societies. So that is one point on my to-do list. I believe also that technology, that we should be able to use more technology, modern technology to protect women in different situations. When they are refugees, when they are internally displaced, everybody these days have a mobile phone. Why can't we use it to make sure that we keep women safer and that we use the best of technology? If we have sort of alarm or a special number that you can call if you need help or just for information and what have you. We have not done enough to make sure that we use modern technology. And these days you can, of course via satellite you can find one person on this planet. So we ought to do more. I haven't seen many good ideas about this but I hope that that will come. And I insist on us being able to measure results. I think it is so important to describe also the successes that we've had and the fact that during let's say the last 15 years more has been done on these issues and the issue of conflict-related sexual violence than under the previous history of mankind. So already we should also measure some of these and value some of these results. That's very, very important. I was asked by a newspaper to write something about, and this will be kind of more political, but I think that we are meeting not in a vacuum. We are meeting in a situation and in a dire situation for this world. And we have to understand what that means. You can hear that I'm so, I have such a bad cold so we'll see if we can manage. So I was asked to make a forecast for next year. I wrote the following. Let's see if I can read it here. I think that 2024 will bring anxiety and anger. Anxiety over the existential threats, climate change and water shortage. And we know that that affects women first and foremost. Wars and nuclear weapons. The geopolitical challenges and changes so profound that they make us feel the tectonic plates move. Anger over growing inequalities, lousy governance and leadership, corruption, and thereby failing democracies. And when we're talking about women, they make up half of the world's population. This is a matter of democracy as well if they cannot participate. The world spends more on militarization than on dealing with climate change. So the outlook is bleak, has to be. But do we have to go over the cliff shouting whoopee? Women all over the world have seen their rights being taken away or restricted in many countries. Be it basic human rights like education, health care, the right to decide over their own bodies, or being listened to. And in Latin America as we've heard, women are being killed, so many women are being killed that it is being called femicide. Sexual violence is a global scourge that despite nice words in resolutions continue to destroy lives. I believe that the coming year will mean make it or break it for women in Afghanistan and Iran. The massive oppression has to stop. It cannot continue. Because women fight in Ukraine, the Middle East, in Africa, and everywhere women fight. They carry children, food, responsibilities. They protest and take the lead, making up half of the world's population and wanting to be defined and treated as more than victims. I place my hope for next year, for 2024, in women. When they are seated around the negotiating tables, being elected to political posts, leading companies, families or organizations, battling injustice and sexual violence, more options and perspectives are brought to bear. Democracy functions better when women are proportionately represented and women's participation should not be a novelty but normalcy. And to say something about hope, because that is also important, and you remember that there is a beautiful poem by Emily Dickinson, she says, hope is that thing with feathers that perches in your soul and sings a tune without the words and never stops at all. All right, so let me make that just an introduction, a little bit sort of overall political, but I think we need to put ourselves in a bigger picture as well when we also talk about conflict related sexual violence. I want to invite my panelists to the scene. Please. Excuse me for being such a coughing, just look at these fantastic people on the scene. And maybe I don't have to present them, you have seen them around, but I will still mention their names, and maybe you will see it also on the screen. We have Dr. Mai Shalam, who is the Vice President of Research Forum Policy Analytics. We have Victor Madrigal Bolos, Eleanor Roosevelt Senior Visiting Researcher from Harvard Law School. We have Natalie Smith, Head of the Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative Team from the UK. Nadine Tounasi, Manager, Survivors Speak Out, Freedom from Torture, and she is also from the United Kingdom Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative. And of course Ambassador Melanne Bervere, she has been presented previously as well. She is a tireless fighter for women's rights. And so I was thinking, I would like to invite you to just give a short, we take the first round and I'll ask you to just give a short to the do-list. What do you think you will be taking away from our two days or three days as it will be here at the US Institute of Peace? So where do we start? Maybe I'll go this way? Please. Okay, get to start again. Thank you. So I do have a do-list. Obviously I've been listening a lot and I'm really grateful for the conversation and really the richness of the subject. I've written my point down and the first thing I'd like to talk about as a do-list or take away on the research is that obviously in the concurrent conversation there was a lot of issue with consent from survivors and the way we seek survivors to engage in consent when we are researching about the experiences or about what has happened and I think that we need to work harder. We heard it over and over how we need to develop consent form that do not only protect the researcher but also ensure that the organization responsible is headed into account should there be anything or should anything happen to the survivor? I know a lot of people mentioned how confidential it is already mentioned but it's not enough, we just need to have really the researcher head accountable that way, you know, it's more balanced. And also one key note on that is that we've noticed that quite often this research questionnaire, many survivors were taken part in this conversation and mentioned how the questionnaire were very long and they found it very hard to engage with survivors and the question were quite technical and then we needed to have a questionnaire that was easy to understand and didn't have so many jargons that way survivors who were participating were not so overwhelmed so really we need to involve survivors in the designing of those questionnaire and really involve survivors from the initial planning of those ones and there was, this is really, you know, staying in my heart a point made about local researchers taking their feedback into account we need to ensure that the local researchers who are working on the ground in conflict zone are listening to when they are feeding back to the donors somebody mentioned how they were told they had no right to question the World Health Organization and I found it very appalling because I don't think they have the reality on the ground and they should be able to contribute and really share we need to actually respect the funding and perhaps really we designed a way they are able to input and I've also, I'm going to steal that phrase someone mentioned that you cannot kill a snake with a long stick I still remember that so really I think the shorter stick would do a better job and we don't have enough representation of survival with physical empowerment and I think this was also crucial we've heard a lot of things but I think that we need to make sure that the issue of all survival are well represented and we address the multi-challenges and also take it into account the context in which survival have experienced sexual violence on policy we do have a challenge with conflict-related sexual violence being visible and really personally I do appreciate all international and local effort the involvement of all the stakeholders however we need this policy really to punish rape as a serious crime we need to strengthen the international legal framework so that survival can see perpetrator head accountable properly for the crime and I think you mentioned earlier on that justice is still a big issue we have noticed that we had a lot of conversation we have multi-disciplinary discussion here but I'm from the DRC my country has been in conflict for a long time and we know that the businesses, the mining industry is also really contributing to this problem but they have not taken part in this conversation we need them to understand the impact sexual violence has on victims and I think the best way is really to have them on this forum and really understand what is going on I think I should stop there for now, thank you continue thanks and thanks very much Nadine for that so yes Margot thank you as you say I'm head of the PSVI team in the UK but I'm basically a month into that role so I wanted to start with some humility that I'm very conscious that I'm surrounded by people with really, really deep expertise from their experience, from their academic, from their policy making work and also start with some gratitude to USIP and everyone here because I think it's just been the most extraordinary two days so far of learning and sharing and the kind of depth of conversation and the commitment to work together on this has really been invaluable but with that said, perhaps with my somewhat fresh perspective I thought I'd reflect what my top three takeaways from the discussion and therefore without presuming to give a to-do to anyone else, what am I taking away from that in terms of the UK government, what we should be doing and so for the first of those three takeaways I wanted to go back to the framing of the very first plenary around the sense that CRSV is not inevitable and I think that kind of north star I suppose in how we're framing and approaching things felt to me kind of something really important and although preventing CRSV it's the kind of really tricky and complicated issue looking at social norms, understanding the difference between different contexts and perpetrators and what that means is really, really not easy work but I think what I would take away from that for my to-do is really commitment to kind of looking at that difficult prevention question in everything we're doing and kind of not shying away from it I suppose and then the second kind of takeaway for me is really around the importance of being genuinely meaningfully, fully survivor centred in everything that we're doing and I think it's been so heartening through this whole conversation that I think there's been absolute unanimity on the importance of having survivors at the centre of the conversation and I really go back to I think Colbasi's point in the first plenary which was around the question isn't what do policy makers want it's what do survivors need but I think although there's that consensus actually getting into the detail of okay well what do we mean by being survivor centred there have been so many really important panel discussions on that over these last two days making sure that it's not a buzzword but it's something that's genuinely meaningful and again for PSVI it's something that I think we've been on a learning journey on we're really committed to but we know there's more we have to continue to improve you know with the leadership of Nadine and Colbasi as our survivor champions and our survivor advisory group many of whom are here today but I think the to do is to continue to learn on that to listen to the perspectives and the insights and then very quickly finally I think my takeaway has just been the value in having this conversation bringing people from different spheres and disciplines together from research from policy from practice but also within those disciplines you know I think speaking just as a bureaucrat you know it's so easy to be you know you're in the peace and justice lane or you're in the humanitarian lane or the gender lane or the rights lane and we you know we don't often enough come together and think about how actually all of these pieces are so critical and so spaces like this to have the opportunity to connect informally are really important but I think for me I also want to take away how do we as PSVI you know continue to use our systems and our structures to make sure that that we're really kind of bringing all those perspectives and voices together and everything that we're doing. Thank you, so we go on. Sure, thank you Margo and first I just want to say thank you to Kathleen and the USIP team for bringing us together for these important days of discussions. I remember vividly being here ten years ago when Missing Peace was launched and participating in that and it's the tremendous the work that you've done over that decade and also for me it's a real personal privilege and honor to be here with some of my own professional and intellectual heroes including master Milan Verveer and professor Elizabeth Wood who you heard from yesterday. So maybe just two or three things to answer your question Margo. The first thing that comes to mind and reflecting on Ambassador Gita Rao Gupta's call to action yesterday during her speech which is ultimately if you're talking about preventing and ending conflict related sexual violence what you have to get at the heart of is preventing, resolving and overcoming conflict. That is the business that we are in and we need to not lose sight of that because hopefully in ten years Kathleen you will bring us back together and we will have made a tremendous amount of progress but that can only happen if we have moved into new ways of resolving and preventing conflict and that means investing in mediation and investing in peace building and making sure that throughout those processes CRSV is always integrated and from that it takes me to the issue of transitional justice and there have been some really rich discussions on that over the course of the last couple of days and transitional justice is my first love my first book was on transitional justice now ten years ago and when I think about where that field has come in the last couple of decades I think one of the things that's really important and we've heard over and over again here is our understanding, our conceptualization not just theoretical but practical of transitional justice and justice in particular has to be broadened. Somebody said in one of the sessions over the course of yesterday that more and more transitional justice takes place in the absence of transition and so what does that mean for conflict related sexual violence? Well what it means at a minimum is that reparations must be part of how we think about addressing CRSV and that includes everything from medical care immediate for immediate injuries and long term morbidities whether that's fistulas or otherwise that means psychosocial support for survivors again in the immediate and continuing basis when we know that those legacies live for decades on and also viable and sustainable livelihoods that help survivors overcome precarity with purpose and so if we're going to think about justice as beyond outside of the courtroom what does that look like? Well reparations have to be front and center for that and then the third thing I would say in response to your question and reflecting on what hasn't been discussed I think adequately in the last couple of days at least where I've been able to participate is how does CRSV fit into and with the digital domain and in particular two things I would mention first and this is especially for those who are working with organizations like PHR or the International Criminal Accord or ICRC in other words is the digital preservation of evidence in the age of hybrid warfare and as cyber operations increasingly intersect with kinetic warfare when you are documenting and collecting sensitive data how are you protecting that from things like ransomware attacks and otherwise that can not only re-traumatize survivors of CRSV but expose them to all kinds of new risks and relatedly and this came up a little bit but I think to your point about a to-do list when we are living in the age of emerging AI and AI generated misinformation and disinformation what kind of risks does that create for addressing conflict related sexual violence I was here just a few months ago for a conversation that USIP had convened with Bintu Keita who is the assistant secretary general and head of the largest peacekeeping operation in the world Monusco and she was talking about how even in her mission and for the protection of civilians mandate including addressing CRSV threats in the digital domain are making it so much harder to do that work so I think that's definitely where our field needs to focus more deliberately so I'll pause there with those three things but thank you so there we got a new topic for sure to put with AI Victor you tried to say that you needed more time being a Latin man but we are very tough we are very tough so your turn I'll try to be as succinct as I can and of course thank the US Institute of Peace for this invitation it's a great honor for me to be here so my task is the first one I think is the exercise that I myself have tried to do during these two days I come to this conversation having done ten years in the field of sexual orientation gender identity and having prepared my second last report to the General Assembly on conflict based violence and discrimination affecting persons on those bases and I actually find that there is a significant point of connection between the findings that that report actually led me to formulate including of course the frailties in data collection systems that not only have frailties because of their inherent design which in very many cases doesn't take into account the way people define themselves and the way in which they self-identify across the world but also in the frailties that Maisha was describing which is the risks that they create not only because of the technological possibilities but because of the political volatility of the topics that we work in it was very often in my time as independent expert that the day after an election there was an organization working in a difficult country saying the next thing that they've told us is that they're going to come and get our computers. The police is going to come and seize the computers with the data that we have there and of course some of my friends in Washington or in Geneva said well why don't they put everything in the cloud and I said well in the reality is they usually don't believe that there is a significant pending task in developing research on what the systemic causes that enable and perpetuate stigma are and I'm interested in speaking about legislation that actually enables the policing of sexuality and actually restricts bodily autonomy. I think that these are great neighbors of sexual violence and of course within that context in a very specific way I'm interested in looking at criminalizing legislation on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity that impacts of course gay men in the case of homosexuality but perhaps it's less known that 44 countries criminalize same sex intimacy between women and of course these are enablers and perpetuate the possibility of sexual violence during conflict. The third task is cross-referencing with my previous work on the torture rehabilitation field where I had the honor of working with Freedom from Torture and other organizations and this notion of the victim centered approach and this actually has a lot to do with power. Power of the victims and survivors over their own stories and the way that their stories are used the way that the data is actually destined and things as basic as the ability to be forgotten which of course in the Euro space is taken for granted but nowhere else actually exists in informed consent processes. I also think that it's particularly important to listen to the calls for legal and psychosocial support. Grace was mentioning this quite specifically and I also think that we're going to be looking at victim centered approaches understanding where it is that we need to be on the binary is an important task because not only do terminologies such as LGBT not necessarily correspond with the way that people identify under but these impacts of course the way in which people self-identify in much wider spaces so I think that this is an important job to take. Finally my last report to the General Assembly which was only presented last week actually lays out an agenda of decolonization which I think it's quite fundamental and I just want to give three keywords in relation to this decolonization of policy and legal frameworks which of course are perpetuating gender policing. It's also the decolonization of terminologies and definitions of identities and the way people occupy public space and I think what importantly is the decolonization of knowledge frameworks. Ali was mentioning yesterday the difficulty and epistemic exclusion of researchers from the global south and the devaluing of knowledge that doesn't follow neatly the axis of valuation that are defined in those terms. Michael carrying out this work was for an inclusive reading of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda which I think it's possible and I think that this can take us very deep into not only the inclusion but also the deconstruction of some of these asymmetries of power that are truly supported by these preconceptions of gender of course so that's a little bit the call that I would make. You see we are opening sort of door after door, the door behind door to understand better what... And many many doors because this journey goes on and I feel no matter how much we have done there is still so much more to do and I think it's particularly fitting and I want to say this that Margat Walsrum is here today on the invitation of USIP because she not only is the mother of the feminist foreign policy and the former foreign minister was deeply committed to these issues but she was the first SRSG on conflict related sexual violence so you belong here Margat. I'm going to come at this and I have lots of things on my to-do list but for this first round in no particular order I really come at this from the policy point of view because I feel that whether it's in the governmental settings or in the multilateral settings there is a lot of work that goes on in terms of policy development and resolution passing and yet as we said in the last panel a lot of this is never truly implemented as it needs to be. I often say that we don't need another resolution to 1325 we've got to implement those 10 resolutions that we have which we're far from doing at this point. So one way of looking at it is the people who are engaged particularly at a very high diplomatic decision-making level say in any of the governments in the foreign ministries are often grappling with issues like in places that all of you know that are places of severe conflict today with a CRSV component to them and yet in doing Ukraine or Myanmar or Sudan or whatever that is not part of what they work on in finding the solutions to those conflicts and we've got to find a way to more holistically ensure that people who are in those very positions understand all of the tools and all of the challenges that they have to address in a coherent way and similarly at the UN we watch very carefully and follow and try to engage in the Security Council debates on the critical areas of conflict and yet despite the resolutions despite what the UN stands for for example a resolution on T-Gray can barely mention conflict-related sexual violence when it was so central to what was going on there so we have severe challenges in this area and I think I mention them because they really are important to the eventual outcomes and I'll tell you a quick story when I first started in the State Department as Ambassador I not shortly, not long after that I was called to testify before the Senate for Relations Committee and the issue on the table was why is the United States not addressing conflict-related sexual violence there happened to be a female chair of the subcommittee who was asking this question when we know when women go for firewood or when they go for water that they're absolutely vulnerable why can't we protect them and I tried to make all of the promises I could feeling passionately about this issue and I went back to the department and asked for a meeting that would pull in many of the offices that really had engagement on this issue and the meeting started with the desk officer for the DRC and Nadine I hate to tell you the truth saying I don't know what women have to do with this issue why we're even here discussing it and I thought we are really a far away from where we need to be now I hope that that's improved dramatically from those days but it has said a lot to me about the need for training of our officials but also the need for them to fundamentally understand how they cannot be effective in their jobs unless they address issues like this another area are the tools and there are so many tools in the toolbox many of which have been discussed over the last two days I will mention one because it's also an area where research policy impact comes together we at the Georgetown Institute did a study on sanctions that the UN has for areas in conflict there are eight sanction regimes as at the time of the study and some of them mentioned conflict related sexual violence some of them do not but conflict related sexual violence is a big part of why the sanctions regime was developed because of the conflict going on in those countries and what it is is a tool to get at some of the leaders in ways that personally affect them and in fact the United States in the last year has also adopted sanctions with CRSV but the question is again the implementation I know that Treasury in terms of the United States just not too long ago raised sanctions on two of the leaders in Sudan but again it's a tool we make much of the tools and I think we really have to work at ensuring that when they're announced that there is more to it than the announcement I was very moved in the last session during the discussion on trafficking I've worked on trafficking for more years than I can count and as Shavon was speaking I was going through a reel in my head of all of the discussions on trafficking horrible problem affects women and men and children predominantly women some of it is for economic in economic ways domestic servitude some of it is sexual violence etc but it is always divorced from a conversation like this the human rights part rarely comes up and institutionally it is in the UN ODC which is the organization of the UN that deals with drugs and crime it's a problem it's a huge criminal problem there are criminal networks behind this in a big way but the amount of trafficking that goes on in conflict affected areas it's almost a beaten path on the part of these criminal networks who see the opportunities in their view of women that they can get at because they're so impacted by the conflict we've got to do a better job of bringing these two areas together just very quickly I have a long list but I'll just say one more and then we can do another round but engaging men has come up in this conference and there are various ways to do that but they, men and thank you Victor have to be a real part of the solution here and having Natalie on the panel reminds me of the former Foreign Secretary of the UK Mr. Haig who put this issue as his priority issue in the Foreign Ministry that's where PSBI came from initiated by a male Foreign Secretary and others would say to me in these meetings G7 meetings or G20 meetings and he's always raising CRSV yes with good reason but we need more of that to really move forward so I'll end there Thank you all and I definitely believe that the whole issue of sanctions is an important one I remember more than 10 years ago when I started that we talked about to design sanctions that would be really effective like preventing people from having cattle you know that there were other types of sanctions that would have been more effective locally or nationally so I think you have added also to that but I think also what you've said is that leadership means something leadership on these issues that somebody dares to bring it to the fore as William Haig did and so on now I think we should take a few questions and then we can have a second round and I want to do it this way that I will ask you can ask a question and then you can direct it to all of them or one of the panelists and then you will get a quick reply and then we take another one so we don't collect several questions but make it a little quicker so more people can ask questions so do you want to to put a question to yes microphone will arrive hi my name is Mabal Gammer-Medhin and I am a co-founder president of United Women with the Horn we are an organization that are trying to get more women from the Horn of Africa into politics into leadership so that we're part of negotiations and peace processes so first I'd like to say thank you so much to both of you for talking about Tigray I'm Tigray and I'm sorry to mention that we are a group of women that are forgotten a lot and so I'm really grateful that you guys have both continued to mention Tigray over and over again throughout both days but today I was able to attend the panel on disabilities and it was very powerful very powerful and very moving and it was one of the panelists and I was incredibly disappointed by the lack of attendance there was maybe under 10 of us and so I really wanted to make that comment it really left an impact on me and I wish we were talking more about disabilities this is not an area that I work in but I feel that we should be talking about it a lot and so I just really wanted to make that comment and really want to say thank you and I'm grateful for being here so much do you want to comment on that to one of you or I'll just say that you were right to be wanting to underscore that because this is an area that doesn't get the attention it deserves and I think it was terrific that the USIP put it on the agenda hopefully more and more governments are going to be responsive I mean it's terrible to go to places and hear this is a person with disabilities she, he, has no future because of the way they are dispensed with once they have that disability and any of us can be disabled in an hour if we cross the street and get hit but this lack of sensitivity and this deprivation of human dignity and then bring in conflict related sexual violence on top of that we really do have to pay more attention so thank you for raising it thank you and Victor thank you just to echo the thanks and perhaps to add one element of information that to me has been very I've learned a lot from my colleague the UN Special Rapporteur of Persons Living with Disabilities and the intersection of our mandates was something that we actually worked a lot on and I wonder and this is just a question that I ask myself and that I will be reflecting on to what extent is this I know your comment was specifically in relation to accession but I am going to go to the larger context of understanding sexual violence that impacts persons living with disabilities and I wonder to what extent the lack of data that I've discussed with Gerald Quinn, my colleague also relates to the compounded stigma that persons living with disability face relating in a social context to their own sexuality because it's very often that the sexuality of persons living with disability is denied and therefore I wonder to what extent this also impacts the possibility of having data gathering points and research points in relation to this issue I'm very proud that five days ago Gerald and I issued a joint statement on the human rights of persons living with disability who are LGBT and hopefully two of the recommendations of the nine that we issue actually impact that existence of research and knowledge also impacting sexual violence against persons living with disability Thank you very much I wonder if there is another aspect of what you just said also when it comes to these negotiations and mediations have you invited some of this big negotiation or mediation organizations to discuss because it seems that they are not very good at introducing the topic of conflict related sexual violence in their mediation efforts or negotiation efforts and I think they need to know better what this is about so maybe that's another big meeting here Please, I would also like to make a comment I remember perhaps speak up the point about Tigray I remember when the conflict started in Tigray there was a survivor from Tigray who reached out to us, Kobayashi and I to join a campaign and I know at the time I think I had it as a dualist and I'm glad I had an opportunity to talk about it again which was I know that at the time Tigray wasn't amongst the country for the preventing sexual violence initiative but we raised that with the PSVIT and I know that the UK government was able to send an expert on the ground so one of my actually dualist was really in order to prevent sexual violence we have to have a mechanism prevention that really allow us to respond quickly when sexual violence secure in a country that is not listed as a key priority so I think for the survivor advisory group I'm really so grateful being here at this conference and I think Kobayashi and I can talk about it with Natalie how we can be more inclusive in the survivor advisory group and really try to have a survivor representation from that group I wanted to just bring in one additional point to your comment about persons with disabilities which is certainly yes the targeting of individuals within conflict zones who have disabilities already at the onset and then being targeted with sexual violence is incredibly important as my fellow panelists have highlighted but I think the other thing that's really important and part of what I was trying to allude to earlier is when sexual violence that's committed during a conflict leaves a person with disabilities and as I mentioned earlier whether that's fistulas whether that's sexualized torture with weapons and otherwise the importance of understanding that long impact and how that affects the rest of their lives and to integrate that better into this agenda and these conversations I think is really important for example in my work with Elizabeth Wood on the Rohingya crisis this is something that we didn't look at with a disability lens and that's our shortcoming but one of the things we did pay very close attention to was how women who were targeted with sexual violence including pregnant women young women elderly women the ways in which they experience mutilation and other forms of deliberate ways to leave them physically impaired and not just unable to have children but also not be able to flee or not be able to have any kind of safety long term and that's just one context I alluded to and so thank you for your point but also I agree completely that the bringing in the disability lens to this agenda is really important as well Thank you I think I saw somebody waving yes you sir Thank you very much it's not a question but I just wanted to add a comment to the survivor with handicap in fact what's interesting is that these are people who are affected in two situations they are more predominant in the conditions of violence in terms of peace and also in terms of war they are more important in terms of peace and also in terms of war so we have to pay special attention to these people not to come and have a good conduct to take, thank you Thank you very much he was saying that you have to understand that people with disabilities are affected both in peace time and in war time so it adds a special I saw there Thank you, my name is Dr. Nipram and I'm with US Institute of Peace I'm also the founder of the Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network I really agree with Dr. Maesha we recently saw how acts of sexual violence and conflict were actually filmed and circulated and made viral and this happened to women of Manipur where I come from which resulted in re-traumatization a few months ago and with no end in sight for these survivors that's why digital and technology impact of what happens to us women, people must be taken into consideration Number two, the whole question of Ambassador I have also mentioned in terms of how transnational organized crimes I did a lot of research on gun running narco trafficking these are the same roots of women trafficking, human trafficking too and sexual violence in these conflict areas it also happened which results in my final point of there are many conflicts that we are studying today in this conference pass there are 26 known conflicts in the world which are reported every day but there are 300 more reported conflicts in the world where sexual violence of women happens every single day my point to the panel is what are we going to do about this forgotten crisis and Victor your last point on decolonization decolonization a lot of these work is done by indigenous communities so again my request to be more inclusive I wish there would like to hear what indigenous women leaders have to say about responding to this crisis thank you very important and relevant questions difficult difficult question as well does anybody want to to come in I'll just Bina you've done such amazing work on bringing the situation monopour to public attention it's a horrible horrible conflict that's been going on that the government has not really addressed under martial law just talk to her it's unbelievably difficult and trying but the point you made that incident that took place not too long ago of the violence to the women in monopour that was sent out around the world on social media with great pride on the part of the perpetrators what they had done exacerbating the problem beyond the horrors that it represented in and of itself should focus this all on how we deal with the social media phenomena as my Asia pointed out because it's this problem it's also women in politics today political violence is occurring in spades on social media there are so many consequences admittedly there's the good side but we really do have to address this adverse side and I think to raise it in this context on CRSV is really important to do so Victor and then Nadine just to thank of course the comment in relation to decolonization and of course the intervention of communities and in particular of course in relation to this work a very quick note of what could be and hopefully will be a long discussion what my report aim to do was to actually bring contribution to the reasoning as to why the challenging of legislative and public policy frameworks is firmly grounded in United Nations objectives and particularly article 73 of the Charter which of course it's a connection that I was hoping to have as a contribution but in the process of creating that report I received hundreds of submissions from indigenous peoples from people representing ancestral identities that actually just made the case that what we would qualify today as gender inclusive frameworks has been the rule in recorded history and so I think the point in relation to this is to tap into that diversity in a non-extractive way but rather in a participative way to understand exactly what kind of democratization dismantling of structures that are not useful from human rights approaches is exactly what I think you're alluding to that participation that in my view is an essential part of a human rights based approach, right? Participation empowerment, accountability and non-discrimination are the four pillars of this. A couple of more comments to this and then we'll have a last question and then we will run. Well just very briefly to pick up on and thank you for the point around technology and to thank Maisha for raising that initially I think this is a very difficult new complexity not only through social media but then the circulation of disinformation on social media of threats I think this is a really complicated topic for us to get into but without wanting to be too optimistic I think there's also opportunities around the digital and technology space for the CRSV agenda and just before this panel was downstairs in the virtual reality scene looking at the Yazidi context and it's unbelievably powerful and you know you think you understand a little bit about the context but it really brought it home so I mean really to advertise that if people haven't gone and we're also as PSVI working with the International Criminal Court with virtual reality at the moment trying to kind of use that technology to help witnesses and survivors to understand in real terms exactly what that experience would be like so I think there are some opportunities there and I think it's much more to understand so thanks. Yeah thank you Bina for your comments and both about Manipura in particular but also forgotten crises in the world you know it reminds me when I was formerly Ambassador Revere's deputy at the institute we had had a journalist scholar come as a visiting fellow and it culminated a book called Mother Where Is My Country which if you haven't read is fantastic and it covers many of the forgotten conflicts in India and including in that region but one of the points that's really important in that book and I don't think we've talked enough about over the course of the last couple of days is when policies are incredibly destructive and they enable conflict related sexual violence and impunity for those I am not an expert on India but I know enough about apps but to know what destructive impacts that's had on protection of civilians and on women during armed conflicts and also in enabling sexual violence and I think you know for us all of us to be paying attention to policies that are enacted including by democratic governments that perpetuate or enable the perpetuation of conflict related sexual violence is incredibly important. One last question. My name is Helene Dugan from the University of Antwerp and I have a question for all of the panel but it was something that Dr. Lam brought up the promise of reparations which we've several people have mentioned and my research is about the former Yugoslavia and I've looked at the reparations process in Croatia and Kosovo and then you see that this is really dependent on political will it came far too late after the conflict and then you also see that it involves a difficult process whereby kind of new hierarchies of victims are created because it's advantageous certain victims over others not the ones that belong to the enemy group things like that there's also discussions about the budget of course and then also the question of how to prove that you have actually been a victim for which people then need to come to commission where they have to tell their story again and kind of give proof so there are also people who do not get the reparations because they are not believed or because they don't have to prove so I wonder whether that is actually the answer because we seem to be very hopeful but I don't know if that is the case so I would like to hear what the other panelists think about that that's an excellent question I think we will make a final round so we start here again would you want to say something I don't think I'm able to answer that but I may touch on my final comment obviously for the past days I've heard a lot about transitional justice I just wanted to really highlight that while it's important to bring a nation to reconcile such a violence to really destroy a nation divide the community I think for me one keynote is also considering that when we are offering or discussing transitional justice we need to make sure that it's survivor centered it needs to be a person choice to really take that route and also involve survivor including children born of war in the peace negotiation I'm really sorry I couldn't answer that thank you very much very quick final comment links a little bit but I think related to that and more generally I think something I've taken away from the full two days is just around the importance of context the importance of recognizing the heterogeneity of the experience of different survivors of different perpetrators and related as well to what that means in terms of address and other areas and I think there's been a number of really valuable important conversations on intersectionality in that context and I'll be taking that away from today I think because your question was in response to some comments I made I think to be clear I wasn't suggesting that that is a one size fits all approach right so you mentioned ICTY and sort of the former Balkans and I worked on the residual mechanism there and I'm not suggesting that what works there works in Kenya TJRC where I also worked and works in special courts and so on I think it's really important to as I said broaden our understanding of justice and make sure that in addition to punitive and retributive measures we're keeping repetitive and restorative measures and I think survivors ultimately move forward with their lives you know I will tell you as a final comment I was working at the UN in 2008 when Security Council Resolution 1820 was adopted which was the first ever resolution to deal with conflict related sexual violence and I was inside the Security Council when that debate took place and then the vote happened and it's easy to lose track of how much progress we have in almost 16 years since then and especially when we are looking for transformation it's easy to lose sight of incremental progress but incremental progress and including on transitional justice is important and must be built on and so I would just encourage that as we work together we also take the long view and hopefully I can build on that aspect that you are making in relation to not one size fits all Rosa Maria made a really good point in one of the panels about trying to keep always an open understanding of what justice means for the survivor or victim and I think that the challenge that we have and I say this having instructed a number of cases when I was head of litigation at the Inter-American Commission is that that understanding changes in justice processes at international level at least in the regional system when you have a survivor or victim having gone through a process that is 10-12 years long it might be that at the beginning expectations were some then in the middle they will change and then towards the end they will change I had the harrowing experience as head of litigation to actually talk to victims that would say to me I've forgotten the reason why I'm here and seeing that the system was having the expectation that this case would be emblematic for non-repetition and then having to say well you have the absolute right of actually saying you don't want to go on so I think that just having that possibility having that understanding and of course having the system have these points of inflection where there are certain absolutes and that's why I mentioned before the ownership of the victim of the survivor of their story and the reason why I keep on saying that is because I've seen far too many times that ownership is lost and that pressures are exercised with good intention but with disastrous results so I would say just answering to Rosa Maria's call to ensure that we keep an understanding of what victims and survivors believe just as is for them at a particular point in time is crucial and I think obviously keeping our attention always on the survivor now I had a really a really emotional experience not that long ago in Bosnia where a woman was attending an event I was at and the organizer said to me she would like to speak to you could you spend a minute or so with her so when I talked to her her eyes were sort of looking down and she clearly was uncomfortable but she wanted to tell me what she told me which was that she had been raped during the war which was now 20 plus years ago and that she has no peace and that she has a hard time living with herself because her perpetrator is the policeman on the corner in her neighborhood who is viewed as an upright admirable human being something is not right with this picture and both on the side of accountability on the side of what she is owed and the price he should pay but this is the story throughout much of Bosnia and throughout other parts of the world in Kosovo on the other hand as you know in recent years they've really tried to do something about reparations and they have come up with a monetary sort of a quasi-pension that could go to women who were violated but as you said it's very difficult for the women who testify because they relive what happened to them and there are times when they're not viewed as being honest in terms of their situation and so they don't get the reparations that they deserve so while there's a real effort in Kosovo and I admire them for what they're trying to do it's not perfect as none of these solutions seem to be and then I think of what Dr. McGwege said to me he said you know the women who suffer from CRSV suffer terribly and they want to heal and he said the thing they tell me most is they want to return to normalcy they want a market they want to be who they are again not what happened to them and how do we put together a reparation that is satisfactory to what those women say to him and he sees the worst every single day so it's a complicated issue but there are people who are caught up in this issue who deserve something better than I think we're able to provide so far in so many places Thank you so much thank you to all our panelists and another round of applause to these amazing people and we are what stands in the way of a reception I understand at the Norwegian Embassy so thank you so much to all of you for all your questions