Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 14 June 2022
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence
UN Women's Peace & Humanitarian Fund: Discussion
Ms Ghita El Khyari:
This goes a little bit beyond the mandate of the Women's Peace & Humanitarian Fund, which is to support women's organisations in crisis settings. From our angle, what we do is to support the women's organisations that want to engage in supporting the overall process of documenting the conflict-related sexual violence and sexual violence as a weapon of war and, in addition, we link service providers to the global processes of prosecution, as the Chairman mentioned.
What we focus on - I can get back to others later - is supporting the grassroots efforts from the civil society organisations and the women's organisations that are providing support to the survivors, first, to identify those cases as what they are and qualified as such, not regular sexual or gender-based violence, document that and then link it to another process that is supported by the United Nations but also member states. There is definitely space for Ireland to provide support in that respect.
UN Women, which is the UN entity for gender, equality and the empowerment of women, has also deployed an expert on conflict-related sexual violence to join the fact-finding mission with the UNCHR to start that process of documentation. There are also some bilateral efforts from some member states to send experts on war crimes in general on site, in this case on conflict-related sexual violence but also other types of war crimes. I agree that it is not only a matter of funding, it is a matter of accountability and expertise but, from our perspective, our role in this big picture is to connect those dots and to support local efforts in terms of how the service providers and the women's organisations identify the cases and feed them into the global justice process that follows in terms of accountability and prosecution.
I hope this answers the question.
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