This is a guest blog by the Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, Brenda J. Hollis, on the occasion of International Women’s Day.
Brenda Hollis at Bishop Johnson Memorial School
Today, over 100 years since International Women’s Day was first acknowledged, we celebrate the progress achieved in the fight to achieve gender equality. We reflect on the courage and sacrifices of those women and girls at the forefront of this fight, and the men and boys at their side.
We also reflect on the challenges that remain to ensure that women and girls achieve their true potential in all walks of life and are no longer the targets of violence.
Inequality and discrimination have fostered an environment which all too often tolerates this violence against females. Women and girls have routinely been treated as “spoils of war”, viciously and disproportionately targeted during conflict, for example in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone.
In these conflicts they were savagely and repeatedly raped, and often used as sex slaves, with fatal or lifelong medical and emotional consequences.
The maltreatment of women and girls in these conflicts demonstrates much work remains to achieve true gender equality; but the response to this maltreatment gives rise to renewed hope. The ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone, have made crystal clear the criminal nature of this sexual violence, and have prosecuted and punished those responsible.
History will judge to what extent this will deter future criminal conduct targeted at females, but there can no longer be any doubt that such conduct is deserving of the strongest condemnation.
The United Kingdom’s Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative is an auspicious development in this regard. In this year of the UK’s G8 presidency, I welcome the priority it has given to this matter.
I also salute its commitment to building on the practices and case law developed by the international criminal courts, thus ensuring more effective and efficient investigation and prosecution of violent crimes against women and girls.
To prevent sexual violence, and to eliminate inequality and discrimination against women and girls, we must all act as one. Each woman and man, girl and boy, must act to ensure that the types of victimization visited upon women and girls in conflicts, and on their sisters elsewhere, will no longer be tolerated.
Justice for all must be just that. There can be no justice until everyone, female and male alike, is treated with the dignity, respect and equality that each deserves as a member of the global community.
