The Missing Peace Symposium (Panel 5)

Date: February 15, 2013

The Missing Peace Symposium: Panel Six: Methodological Challenges and Opportunities

Sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict settings is increasingly recognized as a threat to international peace and security. Globally, state and non-state armed actors use sexual violence against women, men, and children to intimidate and terrorize populations, through forced displacement, destroying communities, and silencing of victims. When fighting ends, sexual violence often does not— undermining post-conflict reconstruction efforts and the transition to more stable, secure, and peaceful societies.

Despite the increased international attention to sexual violence as a weapon of war, including the adoption of UN Security Council resolutions, and important rulings in international criminal courts, initiatives to prevent or mitigate these violent acts continue to fall short. Existing international interventions may lack an integrated understanding of the causes for sexual violence and its implications for societies at large.

The United States Institute of Peace (USIP), the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute North America (SIPRI North America) convened a group of scholars, policymakers, practitioners, and military and civil society actors to examine the issue of sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict settings, identify gaps in knowledge and reporting, and explore how to increase the effectiveness of current responses to such violence.

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Panel Five: Security from Sexual Violence

This panel focused on the idea of a global responsibility to protect individuals from conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence in particular, and critically discussed existing practices.

Ms. Suzan Aref, Women Empowerment Organization, Iraq

Dr. Carol Cohn, Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, USA

Colonel Birame Diop, Partners Senegal: Center for Change & Conflict Management, Senegal

Amb. Liberata Mulamula, Office of the President of Tanzania, Tanzania

Ms. Gina Torry, Peace Research Institute, Norway

Moderators:

Dr. Jelke Boesten, University of Leeds, United Kingdom

Dr. Chantal de Jonge Oudraat, SIPRI North America, USA

Keynote Address

Ms. Patricia Sellers J.D. - Lubanga: Shifting Paradigms of Humanitarian Law

Special Advisor on International Criminal Law Prosecution Strategies

International Criminal Court, The Netherlands

Patricia Sellers is a visiting fellow at the Kellogg College of the University of Oxford, and a renowned lawyer and legal consultant in international human rights law, international criminal law, and humanitarian law. She was recently appointed by the International Criminal Court Special Advisor on International Criminal Law Prosecution Strategies.

Sellers previously served as a Special Legal Consultant to the Gender and Women's Rights Division of the U.N.'s High Commissioner for Human Rights. As the Legal Advisor for Gender related crimes, she developed the legal strategies that led to the successful prosecutions of rape as a war crime, sexual violence as an act of genocide, and rape as torture. For over 13 years, Sellers was the Legal Advisor for Gender Related Crimes and Senior Acting Trial Attorney in the Office of the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. In that capacity, she advised teams of investigators and trial attorneys on the prosecution of sex- based crimes under the tribunals' statutes and pertinent doctrines of humanitarian law. Prior to her work as an international prosecutor, Sellers has also worked at the Directorate General for External Relations at the European Commission, the Ford Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, and the Philadelphia Defender Association.

In 2006, Sellers was awarded an Honorary PhD in Law from the City University of New York. She is the recipient of the Prominent Women in International Law Award given by the American Society of International Law, the Ron Brown Memorial Award for International Law given by the National Bar Association, and the Martin Luther King Award from the Rutgers School of Law.