Maybe it’s all the sun we’ve been having this week, but some foolish impudence leads me to write about football, a subject about which I know little and possibly care less. After an exchange of tweets with @DrBorjaGarcia yesterday, we decided that we’d tackle (sic) the question of the relationship between the World Cup and […]
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Yesterday the eyes of the world were trained on London, as UN Special Envoy Angelina Jolie and Foreign Secretary William Hague opened the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict. An ambitious aim to say the least. The first day of fringe events saw civil society host events highlighting particular aspects of the agenda. From the WILPF focus on Syria, WomanKind on Africa and FGM to the BRIND (Balkan Reporting) asking what lessons can be learned from Bosnia-Herezgovnia. It was clear that the scale of sexual violence (and as many of these panels pointed out, not always in conflict) is harrowing.
Today I attend the first day of ministerial events where the International Protocol on the Documentation and Investigation of Sexual Violence in Conflict will be launched. The document I have just been handed is a weighty one, but nevertheless it relies upon governments to action and commit to realising its provisions on the ground. The Global Summit is a Foreign Office initiative, yet a wide plethora of actors need to be included to realise change including the MoD, DFID and NGOs on the ground.
As the fringe events have drawn attention to, ending sexual violence in conflict requires far more than addressing the symptoms. The root causes can be found in the inequality between men and women embedded in societies. Post-war moments are an opportune moment to challenge the patriarchal nature of society by ensuring women are at the table in decision making talks and to prevent sexual violence going forward. And as the WILPF reminded us yesterday, women continue to be excluded from talks over Syria. The military must also play a role (and this is perhaps where the biggest challenge comes over the practicalities of doing so) in reporting crimes. And impunity must be challenged.
There is also a danger that the focus on conflict will distract us from the sexual violence embedded in societies not at war (including our own). This was an important message highlighted by WomanKind at their fringe panel yesterday. It is important to remember that this is an issue far more pervasive than one confined to conflict.
My hope is that delegates to the ministerial summit follow Angelina Jolie’s lead and engage with the fringe events. There they will find powerful messages, experiences and ideas learnt from experience on the ground which they need to hear in order to even hope to realise the reality of their ambition. We wait to see…
I’m just back from Montreal, where I was invited by the EU Centre of Excellence at the Université de Montréal and McGill University to participate in a roundtable on the European elections. My plan was simple: to go and talk about how well eurosceptic parties of different stripes had done, but how they were likely […]
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A short post today, since in all my cleverness I left my power adapter on the other side of the Atlantic and I can’t face the thought of typing all I want to say on a phone. Last night, I took part in a roundtable discussion on the European elections, at the Centre of Excellence […]
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One of the more particular aspects of European elections is the rather extended process that it involves: voting over 4 days, results taking several more days after that, then a long process of forming groups, all as a prelude to the Commission election process. As a result, I’ve held off writing about it all because […]
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It’s voting day here in the UK, so I’m off to the polling station to exercise my democratic rights. When I vote, I’ll be choosing who represents me in the world’s only supranational, directly-elected Parliament, a body that speaks for half a billion people. And because of a decision made some 15 years ago, there’s […]
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