 to come down and open this session because I get to introduce a colleague who the Institute and I admire very much and who I'm proud to call a close friend. Amachevsky is the Assistant Secretary for Civilization Operations in the Department of State and this is one of the bureaus of conflict and stabilization that does the most on issues that relate to conflict-related sexual violence and we're so pleased that you agreed to come and be with us this afternoon and to talk about the work that you do and about this issue and thank you so much for being with us, welcome. Please thank you again for your partnership on so many aspects of our respective conflict prevention and peace building initiatives. I offer my gratitude and appreciation to you, the U.S. Institute of Peace, Women in International Security and the other missing peace initiative partners for bringing us together to delve into the complex challenges surrounding CRSV and I must say it's a special privilege to be here today with Ambassador Verveer whose exceptional leadership on behalf of women continues to inspire me and so many others who follow in her path and I offer my deepest respect for the commitment and dedication to addressing CRSV that has been and so profoundly evident among conference participants these past two days including among CRSV survivors whose bravery is an inspiration to all of us. This important panel conversation on building connections to conflict-related sexual violence across the peace and security agenda is not only practical, it's essential. As conference participants' remarks and stories have underscored, we have ample evidence demonstrating the urgency of integrating CRSV into our conflict-related policy priorities and frameworks. We cannot afford to leave CRSV in a policy stovepipe or deal with it exclusively in the aftermath of conflict. Indeed, incidents of CRSV are often the canary in the coal mine warning us of the potential for collapse of social cohesion, breakdown of the rule of law, increases in radicalization and militarization and risk of rising atrocities and human rights abuses. Integrating CRSV into policy agendas, therefore, is also an essential aspect of early warning and conflict prevention. The data is clear when CRSV is unadressed cycles of impunity lead to continued cycles of violence. Research by Georgetown's Institute for Women, Peace and Security demonstrates that conflicts are likely to reemerge when rebel groups continue to perpetrate sexual violence during relatively peaceful periods. And the UN has found that an alarming 70 percent of parties who commit CRSV are persistent perpetrators year after year. Also, as discussed in previous panels, we know there are difficult and enduring intergenerational impacts for survivors in their communities. Policy responses must be commensurate with the scale and severity of this challenge. We should leverage all our relevant policy and diplomatic tools to help prevent and address CRSV as a whole of government effort. This is why the U.S. Strategy and National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security highlights that GVV should be recognized and addressed as potential threats to national security and that we will prioritize prevention across all stages of conflict. At the Department of State's Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, we believe it is critically important to work across government as well as with outside stakeholders and partners to find innovative ways to address the systemic drivers of fragility, including CRSV, in our conflict prevention, stabilization, and atrocity prevention efforts. Let me share a few examples of how we are bringing CRSV and GVV considerations into our whole-of-government policy responses. First, CSO has scaled up the integration of data on gender-based violence into the State Department's forecasting, tracking, and understanding of global instability and conflict trends. We are, for example, incorporating data on political violence, targeting women, and on sexual violence and armed conflict into our broader conflict analysis. Working with partners across the government, we have developed a refined toolkit for atrocity prevention that integrates CRSV considerations as a dedicated element of our early warning of atrocities and our analysis of opportunities for preventive action. This approach is designed to allow the US government to better anticipate potential atrocities, contextualize emerging data on CRSV incidents, and call out abuses as they are happening, among other steps. Similarly, we're using GVV data as one of the key indicators in country assessments of levels of potential instability. We are also learning from survivors, how to better incorporate their needs and experiences into our responses to conflict. This means we start by listening to survivors about their priorities for action instead of assuming we know their needs. Survivors know best where there are opportunities to rebuild and address the root causes of violence and instability in their communities. Under the US strategy to prevent conflict and promote stability, our diplomats and interagency counterparts conducted extensive consultations, including with women leaders, women-led civil society organizations, and women's rights networks, among them GBV survivors, to inform partner country and regional plans under the strategy. And related to this strategy during my trip this past spring to partner country Papua New Guinea, I met with local women's groups to hear about the challenges they face. They detailed for me the vital frontline services organized in their communities, including those that aid GBV survivors. In cooperation with our partners, the US government is undertaking programs in Papua New Guinea to strengthen GBV-related judicial processes, train law enforcement on survivor-centered responses, and expand services for survivors. Over the long term, these programs seek to disrupt cycles of violence in Papua New Guinea and communities with the objective of advancing women's opportunities politically and economically. Separately, in Iraq, we are working closely with international partners and local organizations to prioritize prevention and response to CRSV within broader stabilization efforts. Over many years, we've heard from survivors of ISIS's brutal campaign of sexual slavery and genocide about the persistent challenges they face in their recovery. US funding has supported efforts to document and prosecute these crimes through UNITAD, the UN investigative team, to promote accountability for crimes committed by ISIL-Desh in partnership, working in partnership with the government of Iraq, as well as through efforts to advance implementation of the Yazidi survivors' law. Members of the Yazidi community have told us about their challenges and their priorities for addressing local governance in the sub-district of Sinjar. By giving voice to survivors' experiences and leadership, we hope current and future initiatives will build survivors' capacity to mediate community conflicts, participate in early warning and response, and ensure governance that is responsive to their needs. As President Biden has said, prevention is hard work, measured not in days and weeks, but in years and generations. As we elevate efforts to stop the scourge of CRSV and prevent its occurrence in future generations, we need to continue this work together as partners across governments, multilateral organizations with civil society, the private sector, and the academic community. Through evidence testimony of survivors and lessons learned from practitioners, we will increasingly bring CRSV into the policy mainstream. We will. An essential element of ensuring a comprehensive and sustainable approach to peace and stability. I look forward to learning from this impressive panel and to continuing the conversation throughout the symposium this week. Thank you. Thank you, Assistant Secretary Witkowski. Appreciate those encouraging words and indeed we're really talking about integration, collaboration, and trying to take this particular field, a fairly new field, and integrate it. We don't want it to become a silo. It belongs to all of us, so thank you. I'm very happy now to introduce the moderator of our next panel, the panel on integrating conflict-related sexual violence across the policy agenda. I can think of nobody who has worked across the policy agenda on so many issues related to not only women, peace, and security, but on all issues of gender equality. She is the former UN ambassador at large for global women's issues, but she is also the first. And she set the bar very high for all to follow and for all of us who have watched this agenda grow in the U.S. government. She is now the director of Georgetown University's Institute for Women, Peace, and Security. And I'm sure my team can attest. I say it nearly every week. Wow, Milan just pulled that one rabbit out of the hat. She is able to convene and bring important leaders to this important topic. Milan, it is with great pleasure. I turn the floor over to you. And the panelists can now join Milan here. Well, hello, everyone. I want to thank Kathleen for her overly generous introduction. And I particularly want to thank the assistant secretary for her hard work working on conflict and stabilization. You all know just how difficult that challenge is. So it is great to have you here, Ann. And I know many of us will continue to work with you. This morning, having the voices of the survivors dealing with issues like disabilities and children of war, I'm sure all of you felt it was such a searing experience and so important to bring these voices to this conversation. But for us to do the right thing to address the kinds of issues that were presented this morning, which are the critical issues of this conference, we really need to make the policy world work better. And that's really what this discussion is about. And we have an extraordinary group of panelists with us from a variety of experiences who are trying to tackle this issue to have better results. And so we want to start by hearing from them and hopefully having a couple of rounds here. We have a distinguished panel in very limited time. So I'm going to turn immediately to Andrea Freeman, the deputy director of the Office of Sudan and South Sudan Africa Bureau at USAID. And just by saying Sudan and South Sudan, you know how difficult this work is. Earlier on a two-year detail, she was director for fragility and atrocity response at the National Security Council. She focused on the presidential memorandum on conflict-related sexual violence and other issues. So Andrea, you worked on the presidential memo on conflict-related sexual violence. Like so many frameworks and policy directors, I've often thought, having been in government, that as hard as it is to develop these policies, it's much harder to implement them. And that's a good bit of what we want to talk about, the gap between policy and implementation of those policies. So how does that happen in your experience? How does CRSV relate to the atrocity prevention agenda that the deputy secretary mentioned? And how do you see some of the greatest challenges that you've had to deal with? Thank you, Ambassador. In two minutes, I can answer all of that. I'll first start off by saying thank you to USIP for pulling us together. Again, it's always wonderful to be in the company of all of these technical champions on these issues and also with my colleagues from the US government who are secretly behind the scenes working on these issues, trying to make progress every day. I will start off by, because I am a bureaucrat, I will have to start off with the outlining the frameworks and the policies that we do have in place, because that's our guiding star. And I know many of you know these in the audience, but I feel the duty to overview them to the audience just because I think these are very important pieces, foundational pieces for the work that the US government is trying to do, not just in the broader atrocity prevention arena, but also on CRSV specifically. I will quickly name them. I'm not going to go through them and describe them all, but we've got the Elie Wiesel Genocide Atrocities Prevention Act from 2018. We have the 2019 Women, Peace, and Security Act, which also legislated WPS work. And then we have the landmark 2019 Global Fragility Act, which Assistant Secretary Witkowski is trying to lead the charge on that one. Once all of these were passed into law, they actually mandated a number of strategies to be put into place. And that's where the work of the interagency began, in terms of translating the vision of our Congress, and in particular the funding that was allocated with each of these laws into action. And that's, I think, where the rubber hits the road for many of us. I do want to take a moment to recognize that there actually was just two days ago the release of the new Stratnap for WPS, which also, again, places a new unopportunity to shine the light on these issues as well and picking that up. There's also, sorry, excuse me, with these frameworks in place, we also now turn to, so the frameworks at the bar are really high in terms of what we aspire to do. Now comes the implementation and where we are, in terms of how we are implementing, and more importantly, how we are institutionalizing it across the US government, which is really hard work, in terms of inculcating these approaches into every single day that we do, so they're not considered sort of the nice to have aspect of what we do, but they're actually core of our mandate and our everyday jobs for every single officer in the US government. With that, I'm gonna start by talking about USAID, in particular, because that's my agency, and why I've returned to after two years at the NSC. We're the largest donor in most conflict settings, so we have a great opportunity with our programming to lead the charge on CRSD, in particular, and particularly addressing it. However, as a USAID officer, that's where we translate our actions into programs, and the programs, however, don't operate in a vacuum. They operate in the context of a larger policy-making process, and also a number of other factors that influence how we're able to get our job done, and that's where I think the job gets harder for us in terms of greater impact. So despite all of these things that are in place, I think as we've all seen, this was the reason why a number of us within the Gender Policy Council, so shout out to them if they're here, and colleagues at the National Security Council pulled together this presidential memorandum, because we have all of these wonderful things in place in terms of guiding us, and as well as legislation in place for us to move forward on these issues, but we're not applying them as often and in a committed fashion as we should, and that's what drove the creation or the drafting of that presidential memo in particular. So now the question is, now we have a presidential memo on top of that list of other documents. How do we apply that? And I think that's where the rest of us in the US government are trying to, with our own parts of the toolkit, trying to apply that. I have a lot more to say, but maybe I'll stop here. We'll come back in a second round. So you heard Andrea give you the perspective both from her position at USAID and also work she's done at the NSC. We're gonna turn now to Makilah James, who is currently Ambassador Makilah James, who is currently the Senior Advisor at the Africa Center here at USIP. Earlier she served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Africa where we were colleagues and the Sudan's as well. And prior to that she was on the faculty of the National War College. So she has served in a number of very demanding positions dealing with this issue in addition to having been the Ambassador to Swaziland. So Makilah, maybe we just heard from Andrea about how it fits in terms of policies and programs at USAID. Maybe you could tackle this from the perspective of headquarters, shall we say the capital, and embassies around the world or the field. How does that play out? Thank you Ambassador. And I'm really glad that Andrea went first because I wanna free-born to a lot of things that she talked about. The first thing I wanna say though is that it's been fantastic to be here today with all of you because all of you have been providing the kind of research and advocacy that all of us on the policy side need to drive our policies, to drive our thinking. And so it's really been a phenomenal gathering so I wanna thank USIP and our colleagues who put this together. But I wanna thank all of you because really your work is what we don't get our hands on very often as practitioners out in the field. So it's been a great experience for me. To answer your question Ambassador, I have to go back to what it was like when I first joined the State Department. Back in the early 80s we didn't have any of the tools that Andrea just mentioned. We didn't have Women, Peace and Security Agenda. We didn't have the Global Women's Office. We didn't have Conflict Stabilization. We didn't have the Fugility Act. We didn't have the National Action Plan that just came out a couple of days ago. And so we didn't have all of these tools. And I remember being a lowly desk officer working on really complicated issues in Liberia and Sierra Leone during the height of the ugly war with the rough. Women were severely victimized. Sexual violence was rampant. It was a tool of war. It was a way of terror. And you were very isolated. We didn't have the collective in-house think tank to think through issues, to bounce ideas. And we certainly didn't have the language. CRSV wasn't even a term that we used back in those days. So the good news is that we have frameworks now. We have strategies. We have plans. We have all of government mandates that did not exist. So that's the good news. Here's the not so good news. When you're out in the field and you get this wonderful new mandate and you get the wonderful strategy, we do not have the personnel or the resources in our missions to really embrace them fully and to carry out some of these challenges. So we've got to address the personnel that is not up to the challenge of the work that we're asked to take on. So that's one of the big issues I still see. And then I say I look at what we were able to do and talk about back in the early 80s and then we had a period of relatively more peaceful times, at least on the continent. And now we're back to horrible wars in East Africa in particular. And some of the same challenges we had 30 years ago we still have. A couple of those challenges are how do we get more women at the negotiating table? How do we get more women in peacekeeping missions? And so when you're in the field, part of the challenge is trying to get everyone, the whole international community working in these countries to really take up that issue. Women are still not in the numbers we need to be. That would be a game changer for most of the challenges we're talking about throughout our symposium. So that's two of the things that we see. But for me, the real issue is we're gonna have to put more money into the diplomacy side because that's where the personnel have to be. Our developmental officers, we need to have more of them to engage with you. You all are doing this frontline work and we don't have enough people in our missions to be able to engage with you, to be able to partner with you, to be able to identify you is that much harder because you all are really doing the frontline work. So the last thing I would say on this particular question is that what's happening in the field is that because we have so few resources, we're having, we're being forced to be much more creative and much more innovative in how we do things. So we have a whole of government approach in Washington. We've been trying to encourage a whole of mission approach in our embassies. Embassies have to have the DOD person who may have a very narrow agenda from their home agency. We're trying to get them to pick up this agenda as well. Our AID colleagues, our state colleagues and more and more our economic colleagues because I wanna talk about that a little bit more later on but we have a lot of economic tools that can incentivize, that can reward and can punish and sanction governments that aren't doing the right things. So we need the whole mission to be involved. It's not something that the political officer or the AID officer alone can do. We have to bring in the entire country team as we call it and that's been one of the developments to fill in the resource gap from Washington. Well, so much of what you said is familiar, Makilah. I remember when we put out, the president put out the National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security before we had the law and so many of the embassies were excited about the prospect, particularly women on the teams and the first thing they said is we don't have any money, can you help us basically implement some of this and if it hadn't been for USAID, probably still wouldn't have had any money. So there's just a lot of challenge that goes on in government as much as there is a real commitment to try to be more effective. So we've been talking about the US situation here with Andrea and Makilah and we're gonna go now to Emily Kenny who is the policy specialist on rule of law transitional justice at UN Women and as all of you know, the UN plays a very central role in all of this with many resolutions and many commitments and obligations and the role that you play is in peace, security and resilience section of women's access to justice in conflict affected countries and accountability for conflict related sexual violence and gender-based violence. So Emily, how do you work within UN Women because any of us who've dealt with UN Women, it plays both a critical role at headquarters and certainly beyond in many a country, some of the best people on the ground are UN Women staff and that is complicated enough within UN Women and then how does UN Women relate more broadly across the United Nations where we know there are also complications? So in two minutes or less, no, I'm kidding. But we're happy to have you here. Thanks for the UN perspective. Thanks very much, Ambassador Bevere and a quick thank you to our hosts and to the US Institute of Peace for having this amazing conversation. It's been a fantastic two days of learning and it's such an honor to be on this panel and to learn from these women. So I'll answer this question from the lens of my own personal work at UN Women. As you mentioned, I'm a policy specialist on rule of law and transitional justice and I work at the intersection of the UN's agendas on women, peace and security, conflict related sexual violence and the rule of law. So I'm going to try in now one and a half minutes to walk you through what this looks like in practice. But first, I think many of you are familiar with UN Women but maybe not all so let me just very quickly introduce. UN Women is one of the youngest members of the UN system created by the General Assembly in 2010. The organization has a mandate to promote gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls and we do this mainly through the work of our more than 80 country offices around the world. And UN Women works on issues from women's economic empowerment to women's political participation. We are also the UN system lead on the women, peace and security agenda. So now I'd like to kind of paint you a Venn diagram of CRSV, women, peace and security and rule of law at least from where I sit in UN Women. So at UN Women, our work on CRSV sits kind of within the circle of our work on the women, peace and security agenda. As has been mentioned by a number of other panelists we have 10 resolutions from the Security Council on Women, Peace and Security. Five of those focus specifically on conflict related sexual violence. Now the other half of the resolutions we haven't talked about so much. And these resolutions are a little bit of a mixed bag but they include an emphasis on women's leadership and participation in decision making on peace and security, including in peace processes, peacekeeping and peace building. In addition, nine of the 10 WPS resolutions specifically mention justice or rule of law to a greater or lesser extent. And in fact, resolution 21-22 from 2013 says that, the rule of law is one of the key elements of conflict prevention, peacekeeping, conflict resolution and peace building. And this is one of the 10 women, peace and security resolutions. So clearly WPS incorporates a really strong angle and lens on rule of law and transitional justice. So at UN Women, most of our work on rule of law like our work on CRSV fits under the kind of big circle of the women, peace and security agenda. Now just before lunch I was an audience member in an amazing panel on intersectionality and so I think it is important to note that one of the limitations for UN Women of our approach to CRSV and to rule of law being under the umbrella of women, peace and security is that we often lose focus on the non-women who are victims and survivors of CRSV, men and LGBTIQ plus folks. At the same time UN Women does have some fantastic examples of how we have included male survivors and LGBTIQ plus survivors. So I think we shouldn't take for granted that this framing of women necessarily excludes these populations, but I do want to acknowledge that it is often a shortcoming that we don't necessarily, or we're not necessarily the best at including these groups, but hopefully we can continue to do better. I also just wanna say a quick word about the distinction between UN Women and the Office of the SRSG on sexual violence and conflict because I think there's often quite a bit of confusion, are we the same, are we different, how do we work together? And I see Tandari all the way in the last seat in the back so he can correct me if I get any of this wrong. But UN Women is an agency of the UN and as mentioned we have more than 80 country offices, five regional offices, thousands of staff working around the world and we work on issues including but far, far beyond CRSV. On the other hand, the SRSG's office is very specialized. They're not an agency, they sit within the secretariat of the UN and they have a really specific mandate to coordinate, monitor and do advocacy on CRSV. So in short, we are separate parts of the UN system with different but complementary mandates and we really try to do our best to work together as much as we can and complement. So I sit within the peace, security and resilience section and we are the team that is tasked within UN Women to support implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda supporting member states, civil society and victims and survivors of conflict related sexual violence and it's really my job to provide that kind of technical support to all of those different stakeholders to incorporate gender responsive and gender sensitive approaches to transitional justice in their work. So very, very quickly. I think to kind of paint a picture of how CRSV, WPS, rule of law all work together in my work, I'll just quickly explain how UN Women does our global programming on transitional justice. We have three objectives to this global programming. The first objective is to support duty bearers to pursue accountability for women's human rights violations and gender-based violence including CRSV. So here we really have kind of the protection pillar of the Women, Peace and Security agenda. The second objective is to promote the meaningful participation of women and all CRSV survivors as rights holders in transitional justice processes. So here you really see that participation dimension of the WPS agenda. And third, we aim to really intentionally have transitional justice processes be transformative to address gender inequality as a root cause of conflict and CRSV. So there you see the prevention dimension of the WPS agenda in our transitional justice work. I have examples of this, country examples, but I'm gonna save those. And just last point is just on integration of this work beyond UN Women in the broader UN system. Now a lot of this work is mostly about meeting with people and editing documents and adding in gender language in places which is not so interesting. But one great example of this is we have a brand new Secretary General's guidance note on transitional justice launched just last month. And it was a really collaborative process of developing it across the UN system. And in the end, we were able to get gender responsiveness as a key factor to the UN's approach. And if you look at this section of the guidance, it has a striking similarity to the framing of UN Women's Programming on TJ that I mentioned. So you can imagine how it was written. And I think in many places, it's a challenge for me to do my job of inserting gender language, having it taken out, putting it back in, and making people fight me to take it back out again. But this was an example of a really collaborative process where you can see that really strong gender and WPS dimension in the UN's guidance. Thank you. Thanks, Emily, and we'll get back to some examples. And I thought your mention of the SRSG, Pramila Patton, who was with us yesterday, was interesting because there is complementarity, but its distinction is that it was one of those resolutions to 1325, the creation of it. In fact, it was Secretary Clinton who put this resolution forward in the Security Council. Was it 2010 or 11? I think so. Anyway, we're gonna turn now to Sivan Malali from Ireland. But she, in 2020, was appointed the special rapporteur on trafficking in persons, especially women and children. She is also the Establish Professor of Human Rights Law and the Director of the Irish Center for Human Rights at the School of Law at Galway University. Earlier, she was a member of the European Council group of experts on action against trafficking in human beings, and she's had countless other positions. Welcome to you as well, Sivan. This is another really tough issue, the trafficking of human beings. So let me ask you how it intersects with the CRSV agenda and the gaps seem to continue in prevention, which I think is very, very tough. And protection, can you talk about some of those challenges and hopefully some successes in places where you've worked like South Sudan and Columbia and Bangladesh? Thank you very much, Ambassador Verveer, and thank you very much to the US Institute of Peace. And it's a great pleasure to be here and to have had the opportunity to hear from so many distinguished experts and practitioners over the last day and a half and to be part of this panel. So the UN special procedures, as you may know, we're independent of the UN. I report to the Human Rights Council the kind of different working methods or we can issue communications to states. We undertake country visits where states accept those. We complete thematic reports and specific issues of priority focus. And we try to work to integrate the particular issue, in my case, trafficking in persons into policy agendas to secure greater impact. What I would say is with regard to trafficking in persons, although we've had a series of Security Council resolutions now since 2015, what we continue to see is that in practice, trafficking in persons is missing. Is missing in peace building measures. Is missing in conflict prevention. Is often missing in discussions on security sector reform on the ground. And is also surprisingly missing in the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. I work very closely with the Office of the SRSG, Sexual Violence and Conflict, with the Office of the SRSG on Children and Armed Conflict, the SRSG on Violence Against Children. I work with UN treaty bodies and with UN agencies to try to overcome these silos and to understand why is it when we have a very clear normative framework, why is it that trafficking in persons is missing in terms of prevention and protection work on the ground. An example, a report from the Global Protection Cluster on internally displaced settings, found that only one in five protection clusters had any specific focus on trafficking in persons. And the reason it was echoed a little bit in what was said by SRSG pattern yesterday and what I hear on the ground, on country visits and in meetings that trafficking in persons is perceived perhaps as being less serious or as highly technical, something that's very specialized. It's developed in a way that's really focused on individualized human rights violations, seen as a criminal offense, but not integrated into the practice of international humanitarian law or international criminal law or even international refugee law. And even the very significant developments that we've seen in international human rights law since the Palermo Protocol and predating that, of course, in the prohibitions of slavery, in prohibitions of forced or compulsory labor, prohibitions of servitude, they're not applied in practice to trafficking in persons except in very limited, with very limited exceptions. So if we look, for example, at the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court, trafficking in persons is included within the crime against humanity of enslavement, included within the war crime of sexual slavery, but we haven't seen any prosecutions for trafficking in persons. If we look at the work of the investigative mechanisms of the Human Rights Council and the Security Council, again, surprisingly, with only one or two exceptions, despite the fact that they are describing fact patterns, situations, violations of international humanitarian law, international criminal law, human rights law, that meet the definition of trafficking in persons. They're not identified as such. Also with regard to transitional justice settings, transitional justice processes don't address trafficking in persons that have occurred in conflict situations. And the consequence of that, it's not just to add another name tag, but to actually point out the gaps in terms of access to justice for victims and survivors, and the very serious gaps in relation to prevention, that those patterns and the systemic trafficking in persons that we see in conflicts and post-conflict, it's not addressed, and our prevention procedures and practices are much weaker than they should be. Protection services are not in place for victims and survivors of trafficking, and there's limited accountability. So continued impunity, so we don't end up breaking that cycle. An example from Uganda, in terms of better practices, I worked closely with the refugee law project in Uganda, and we had a program looking at how to integrate questions around trafficking, but importantly, that had to be translated in different ways, again, because it's perceived as highly technical, different from the ordinary experiences of displaced persons and refugees, but to build it into screening processes. And a lot more information came through on the experiences of South Sudanese refugees, Congolese refugees arriving who were victims of trafficking, but would never have identified themselves as such, but also had not been identified by protection services. And so what you often see on the ground is highly specialized services and practices within criminal justice settings with significant funding, but those not being applied in humanitarian or conflict settings. So even where there is expertise, even where there is capacity on the ground, it's not being applied in practice in those wider humanitarian and conflict settings. Yet when we undertake country visits and meet with those directly affected on the ground, it's very clear of course, trafficking in persons is a strategy of armed groups. It's a strategy of designated terrorist groups as we know for some time now. It has consequences in terms of peace building efforts. For example, in the country visit to Columbia, as we discussed with many on the ground, the continued links between armed groups and criminal networks, often targeting specific communities and in particular migrant and refugee communities, that can really seriously undermine the peace building process. Again, in South Sudan, abductions of children, abductions of women for purposes of exploitation, sexual slavery, domestic servitude, forced marriage, all of these undermine peace building processes. So we need much greater attention to that. And just to conclude on the different silos, again, what we see is that trafficking in persons often targets particularly communities such as people with disabilities, migrant communities. It needs to be built in to work on racial justice, on the rights of persons with disabilities, on the rights of persons of diverse gender identities who don't get access to protection services, where we see prevention services not working, and who may be particularly targeted in conflict and post-conflict settings. So that needs to be integrated into the trafficking work. And I think we need to do a lot more work to translate that into practice to be effective. You know, I've been in so many trafficking discussions over the years, and I think so much of it starts with these criminal bands that are basically preying on women who have no opportunity and fall into a nightmare as a result. And rarely, you're so right, rarely is that connected to the conversation we're having here. So maybe this is one of the recommendations that has to come out of this symposium because you make some very important points. And I think it's largely in the UNODC, as opposed to where all of these issues live in many ways. So thank you. And now we're gonna turn to Robina Rumbiwa, who is a feminist communication specialist, a poet, an educator, a mediator, a peace activist, and so much more. She is the founder and national coordinator of a Coalition for Action on Resolution 1325, known as COACT, an alliance of 53 women's organizations working for the full implementation of the WPS agenda in Uganda. Where for more than a decade, she has been engaged in developing local mediation capacity and is herself a mediator. Robina, you have a different background in many ways from some of the others here on the panel, an important background. Can you talk about the connection of preventing sexual violence and 1325, and also women peace builders and the vital role they play as first responders? Thank you, Ambassador. Thank you, our host and USIP for convening this. I feel greatly honored to be here and I've learned quite a lot since the beginning of this symposium and I still look forward to more. Listening to many panelists here has been enriching for me. So Uganda sits in the middle of the Great Lakes region that is conflict prone and very volatile. And it's a troop contributing country, but it is also the top African refugee hosting country. So that is just to put ourselves in the context of what I'm going to share. I see 1325 as an important tool for the issue that we are talking about, you know, conflict related sexual violence. If you look at the original pillars of 1325, we are looking at participation. We are looking at the participation of women in decision making and in peace processes. We are looking at prevention of conflict, but also preventing of violence against women, you know, and violence of all forms, including conflict related sexual violence, including gender-based violence. But we are also looking at protection, protection of women during crisis. And this is during displacement, whether they are refugees, whether they are internally displaced persons. In Uganda, we get a lot of that. You know, sometimes when it gets too dry, people have to move to areas where they can find water. Or when the rains are so much that rivers burst and wash away people's homes. So you apply resolution 1325 across all these borders, but also the fourth pillar is relief and recovery. And you know, I remember in the early days of 1325, we used to refer to it as post-conflict relief and recovery. And so it made the fourth P. And as we trained, we always referred to them as the four P's. So when we are looking at the prevention of conflict-related sexual violence, we want women on the table. We want women involved. We want them involved in decision-making as a practitioner on the ground. I'm a grassroots worker. I work with communities where conflict happens, where sexual violence happens. And when it happens, it's women peace builders who are actually on the ground that will come to offer the first response. So looking at participation, and I think the UN agenda now on humanitarian action is that it should be gender responsive. They call it GIHA, gender in humanitarian action. So integrating the role of women, the concerns of women, the needs of women into all programs for the prevention of conflict-related sexual violence is very linked to 1325. And when we are talking about prevention, I think from yesterday morning, we've been linking prevention of conflict with prevention of CRSV, because unless we prevent conflicts, we really can't prevent CRSV. So again, we see the link between CRSV and 1325. And when we are talking about protection, the same thing, you are protecting people, you are protecting women and girls during conflict, offering them safe areas where they can go and find security and find safety. The same thing with when we are looking at CRSV, we've got to create safe spaces for them and protect them against it. So in our countries, we try to make sure that there are national laws and policies that enforce protection and 1325, that also integrate CRSV. When we talk about the relief and recovery pillar, women and girls who fled Uganda from Eastern DRC from South Sudan are fleeing conflict. They are looking for safety. They don't have a home. So they need relief, they need recovery. But as they flee, they are attacked. They are attacked when they are at home, sometimes by the military, sometimes by other armed gangs, but they are also attacked as they flee. They are attacked by their neighbors, by men they know. These are the stories they tell us. So when they come, you are looking at preventing all that. You are looking at providing relief for them in that kind of context again, which is clearly linked to 1325. So the role of women like me, we call ourselves women peace builders, it becomes very critical because we are on the ground. We see the faces of these women. We give you and women the data that they need to use to design their programs. But for us, these data are faces. They are faces of women, they are faces of men, they are faces of children. And so the women peace builder as fast responders, get on the ground, I can talk about a number of organizations that are members of co-act that started when Uganda was at war with the Lones Resistance Army, and they started out of mobilizing each other to offer support to women who would be running at night after their homes had been touched by the Lones Resistance Army and they would run naked and other women would gather them and put them in their homes and protect them and feed them so they are the fast responders. So when we talk about these grassroots women peace builders, they play a critical role in this effort. And they play a critical role in protection, but they also play a critical role in prevention. And they also play a critical role in increasing the participation of women because we do the training of these women. We give them their skills in leadership, in peace building, but we also engage in advocacy at different levels and create platforms for them. Yeah, so I don't need that. Well, and I'm glad you did focus on women peace builders because it's a very important force for change and transformation, yet rarely funded as well as they might be and taken as seriously as they might be or should be, I should say. I got a message about start wrapping up and yet there is so much that this panel wants to say. So I think what we'll do is take your questions and hope that in answering your questions, they can add some of the things they wanted to say that we haven't had time for. So please state who you are when the microphone comes to you and what your affiliation is. Do you want to put your hands up? Thank you. My name is Nyashankwath Thay. I'm from South Sudan. I work with UNFPA, but also I'm an activist and a human rights defender. It brings me so much joy to just listen to such great powerhouse that full of powerful women who bring a lot to the table in terms of experience and also in terms of changing the narrative. Mine is more of a question related to integrating policies when it comes to trafficking and also sexual related gender based violence. I think many have been traveling in East Africa to be specific. If you are traveling on these flights, you see a lot of East African vulnerable young women who are in uniforms going to the Gulf countries under the name of that they're going for better opportunities and for work. Myself, I made a tweet that went viral around that because I had a feeling this is just a systemic trafficking in a way that makes it look like these women are going for work. But also there is a network of different stakeholders who are making sure that these women, these vulnerable young women are going to Gulf countries under the name of going for work, but they are not protected. So how do we make sure that the international policies that we have as well as the regional policies and national policies that we have on sexual related gender based violence as well as also on trafficking and protection of women is integrated in a way that these women are protected somehow. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for this insightful panel. My name is Weiwei Nu from Burma. I have a question, quick question to Andrea. I'm not sure if you can answer. I wonder if there's the interagency tax force on the trustee prevention. I wonder how much of CRSB is integrated in the interagency work. And also as a State Department, how much is there any progress or increase of programming and budget on the trustee prevention and CRSB? And one other question is to perhaps a special reporter on human trafficking and perhaps Emily and whoever want to answer, which is related to the human trafficking. In Burma, we have two types of, two main groups of human trafficking. One is going to Burmese and ethnic women traffic to mainly China and other neighboring countries. And the other critical one is the refugee, Rohingya refugee women fleeing from Rakhine and Bangladesh by land and by sea. And throughout these journeys, these women face series of sexual violence under different traffickers on land as well as on the sea. And as far as I am aware, it's been a majority of the women who have been fleeing face some form of sexual violence, raped and many other abuses. But so far, there is no mechanism that provides or assist them from overcoming from those abuses and violence under the UNHCR or other UN agencies. And law of the sea does not protect these sexual violence have been on the sea and that often occurred in different territory of the sea. And how do we address this issue and how do we bring this issue to the policy making level and implementation? Thank you. Thanks, Weiwei. Let's start with those two, Andrea. I'll turn to you and then to Siobhan and anybody else who wants to come in on it. But I think the point has been made by both of you of how places in conflict are rich for the criminal bands who wanna prey on women and traffic them. And we see it in Ukraine with the conflict there but we see it in every conflict. And yet there isn't that kind of intersection in policy circles that there should be. So Andrea, why don't Andrea, why don't you start? And then we'll go to Siobhan and then anyone else and then more questions as we have time. Great, thank you. Weiwei, I'll try to answer your question. I think Assistant Secretary Witkowski I think outlined a couple of things that the State Department is doing as part of the Interagency Task Force on atrocity prevention. I think in terms of integrating CRSE specifically into the broader work, a couple of smaller things but I think we're moving the needle on them and I'll watch if I'm getting the answer right here. One of the tools that the community uses is Atrocity Risk Assessment Framework and there's been a lot more focus in terms of integrating indicators and other sort of contextual items as they are analyzing a certain country context that includes risk factors that would highlight where CRSD might be escalating or could escalate and also then in turn provide recommendations for that. So that's what's one area. In terms of funding specifically, so there is a small budget for training. I'm a big believer in training for US government staff in general writ large on these topics. I think the more technical some of these topics sound, the less appetite there is sometimes to take these classes because it sounds like it's something that somebody over there down the hall is supposed to be doing and not you, right? And I think the point of the AP training which my colleagues at State and other places are really driving forward is this is everybody's job. This is part and parcel of your job every single day. And so learning these various pieces about what AP means and the various analytics behind it is really important. When you get shipped off to country X, it could be South Sudan, Yachankwoth, right? So that people are prepared to see what's happening and understand the context and better be able to respond not only to do early warning, right? But also early action, which is I think the goal for all of us and I'll stop there. Do you wanna say anything else about Sudan? Specifically. I have a lot to say on Sudan, but I think I'm going to hold for a moment because I think there might be other questions. Siobhan. Yes, thank you very much for bringing up the situation of domestic workers, migrant women workers from East Africa to the Gulf region. Anyone who's been in Entebbe Airport, it's absolutely horrific, the lines of women, young women in uniforms and you know what awaits them because unfortunately we see it in the media reports. My mandate has issued communications to several countries in the Gulf region, highlighting these issues. Uganda, I'm sure you know, suspended its bilateral labor agreement with Saudi Arabia at the end of last year but it's now reinstated again. But we really need to look at access to decent work, access to employment, prevention of trafficking for purposes of forced labor and domestic servitude, which is often intersecting with sexual exploitation and situations of sexual slavery and absolutely horrific abuses and the Human Trafficking Legal Center here in DC does fantastic work trying to highlight these issues but it's ongoing. It continues and we really need to step up the work. It can stop, it should stop but there needs to be much more effective prevention work on that. Even in South Sudan, for example, in Juba, we heard accounts of women traveling from Eritrea down through Juba, onwards to Entebbe, going to work in the Gulf region. Deceptive Job Offer is targeting refugee centres in Kiryandongo, in Uganda, again feeding into this demand for domestic workers and the intersections of gender, race and ethnicity, migration, all of that we see happening in these horrific settings and it's often those who are displaced in refugee settings or IDP settings who are targeted and very vulnerable to this kind of exploitation and abuse. On Myanmar, Burma, in Cox's Bazaar, for example, we met with Rohingya women, girls, boys, men who were being targeted, who had accounts who had returned, targeted for purposes of child marriage, sexual slavery. Law of the Sea, International Human Rights Law continues to apply, Law of the Sea applies but what we see is that when people are intercepted at sea, including children, they often end up in detention settings, left in the same clothes without protection services and subject to punishment often being detained because in an irregular migration status rather than being given protection and recognised as victims. And here I just want to highlight the intersection there, for example, of in Cox's Bazaar, Rohingya refugees do not have refugee status, many are stateless, children don't have access to schooling except in the Myanmar curriculum because they don't want integration into the host community and Bangladesh is hosting huge numbers of refugees with very limited support. But this becomes a protracted situation where you don't have freedom of movement, you don't have access to education and employment and of course it's ripe to be targeted for traffickers. And these issues will be upcoming at the Global Refugee Forum in December where trafficking is one of the thematic issues that we're asking states to give pledges on. That's a great point. We have a couple of tools in the US government that have shown themselves to be rather effective around the issue of trafficking and CRSV. The human rights report that we put out annually, it is a well-read document and we hear from governments immediately in the host country when that document is published. It's not as good as it could be on every issue, in particular on CRSV, I looked at a few of them last night, we don't really drill down as much as we can there, we talk about abuse in conflict situations but CRSV could be beefed up but that's a really important document and it involves the embassies and our development officers and our staff from Washington coming out and engaging with people like yourselves. That's a really important tool. Government hate to see themselves talked about, our friends hate it, our adversaries hate it but we put that document out because it's a useful tool for all of you, it's an advocacy tool. The second thing I would say is foreign assistance. We know that foreign assistance can be a reward and incentive but it also can be a sanction and taking away some of our trade preferences this year has gotten the attention of some governments. I don't need to name names, you know the kind of countries that hate to see that happen but that's been a very useful tool. So doing more of that, thinking smartly about how do we use our tools to incentivize the behavior we want and to punish the behavior we don't want. You know that's a very good point but we also have the trafficking in persons report that comes out and it doesn't make some of these connections that could be made in terms of the assessment. So that might be another place where we can certainly do better. Anybody else on this? I just wanted to share some of what we do within the refugee settings. We conduct awareness raising when refugees enter Uganda. We have tens of volunteers that raise awareness on CRSV and on sexual exploitation and abuse on illegal trafficking and we also run what we call safe spaces in the refugee settlement and in the awareness raising sessions we tell them about these safe spaces and the services that we offer and we also explain the referral mechanism for sexual violence or forms of sexual violence. So at the safe spaces that co-act runs, we ensure the dignity of survivors. When they arrive, we make sure they have a dignity pack that includes soap, that includes pairs of underwear, that includes a list so that women wrap themselves around with or can use to wrap a baby because when they are fleeing, they don't think about packing these things but we also make sure that they are trained health workers in the safe spaces and we also have social workers to deal with those that are suffering from trauma and at the same time we offer counseling services and we work with psychologists for those that are highly traumatized but it is important that they understand that trafficking exists within the refugee setting and they need to understand so that they can be aware of that. What we find most when we ask the refugee women and girls what they need, most of them want to start a small business. It's always about livelihoods and so how we've done that is that we encourage them to form village savings and loan groups and then we give them a small fund. I am ashamed of mentioning how much we give them. It's an equivalent of $50 but really it makes a lot of difference from them so they use this fund as a starting point for a revolving fund and they save on a weekly basis whatever amount they agree on and they can borrow from this little money to start a market store, to sell tomatoes, to sell mangoes and we have a lot of fruit in Uganda to start something small so that it helps to restore their dignity but also their own self-belief and it is going to be livelihoods really in refugee settings that helps prevent the kind of trafficking that we are talking about but will also help reduce sexual exploitation and abuse in refugee settings and can be a means of restoring the confidence of survivors of CRSVI. Well said. Economic livelihoods and opportunities are absolutely critical. I think we have time for one more question because I'm getting the sign up there. Thank you presenters. My name is Grace Achand from Uganda. I come from the northern part and a co-founder of a victims led organization called Women's Advocacy Network and I also work with Refugello Project. My question goes to Emily, especially on issues of policies. I think somehow we are forgetting about those who have suffered CRSVI in a way as I've also had presentations from Madame Robina because they have suffered for long and their only hope is on the policy. For example, the Ugandan case that transitional justice policy was passed in June 2019 but after that is silent in somebody's office. This is the only hope that survivors of CRSVI has so it's silent and a lot is happening. Like you can see interventions are going, yes, it's good, it's going to refugees, right? But those who have suffered for more than 20 years are still there and their issues have not been dealt with. What can be done? How can you kind of help in speeding the process? Because all we want is they have been talking about policies. We have been contributing several times on the policy like on the many, because it took almost 10 years for the policy to come out. Definitely it's out and it was like a very great, it was a great joy when victims had this. Now it cannot come out. How long are we going to wait? The violence that victims have suffered is not waiting, it is getting complicated. How many children have been born? Imagine it is estimated that over 20,000 women suffered this and it's more than that others have not been documented. How long are we going to wait? Thank you. Emily, do you want to take a crack at this? Thanks very much Grace for that. I don't know if it's exactly a question, but that kind of challenge to what do these policies mean compared to the reality for survivors in places like Uganda where justice really seems so very far off. And I think that's kind of the unfortunate disconnect between the policy and the reality. And so I, to be honest, I don't have a great answer for you, but a few, I think the main challenge in many contexts is simply that there's not political will to move forward with accountability. And part of that is because the perpetrators are people in positions of power. And so up against that lack of political will, there's only so much that a policy can do. But one of the things that UN Women does in places around the world is to support women's organizations and survivor networks to understand what their rights are and to develop their own advocacy to advocate for those justice processes to move forward. UN Women advocating for them with the government doesn't do, it does something, but it is not nearly as powerful as a strong civil society movement that is constantly asking for change organizations like yours, Rubina. So I think UN Women really in situations where justice seems very far off, we focus on creating that civil society movement to push for change. We're gonna have to close, Rubina, but maybe we can have some conversations separate from this platform with Grace. And Grace, I think your question or your comment was the perfect conclusion to this panel because this panel is all about policy responding to the realities on the ground with respect to CRSV. So thank you for that and let's hope we can go forward and do a better job. These hardworking people know what the challenges are, but let's thank all of them for their extraordinary work. Thank you.