

governments, including military and judicial representatives.work effectively to strengthen existing United Nations coordination mechanisms.provide coherent and strategic leadership.The prevention of sexual violence is an integral part of broader Security Council resolutions on conflict prevention and sustaining peace.Īs set out in SCR 1888, the role of the SRSG-SVC is to: This means both helping the victims and helping to ensure that there are no more victims. In this sense, there has been an evolution from responding to sexual violence like any other tragedy to preventing sexual violence like any other threat. Today prevention is one of the most important goals with respect to conflict-related sexual violence.
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With SCR 1888, the international community not only recognizes the detrimental impact that sexual violence has on survivors and communities, but it also acknowledges that this is a crime that is preventable and punishable under international law. While acknowledging that in conflict and in post-conflict situations national justice systems may be significantly weakened, it was very concerned that only limited numbers of perpetrators of sexual violence have been brought to justice. The Security Council established the mandate of the SRSG-SVC because it recognized the widespread and systematic use of sexual violence as a weapon or tactic of war and the impunity enjoyed by perpetrators, evident through the limited prosecution and punishment of perpetrators. In this regard, it is important to understand the significant paradigm shift in the way sexual violence is viewed. It urged the debunking of the myths that fuel sexual violence and the notion that rape is an inevitable byproduct of war. SCR 1888 was preceded by ground-breaking SCR 1820 adopted in 2008, which recognized CRSV as a threat to security and an impediment to the restoration of peace. The mandate of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict (SRSG-SVC) was established through the adoption of Security Council resolution (SCR) 1888 in 2009 to tackle conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) as a peace and security issue, while also bearing in mind other serious violations of human rights that occur during armed conflict.
