Oral evidence - Sexual Violence in Conflict

Bishop of Derby (Chairman)

Lord Black of Brentwood

Baroness Goudie

Lord Hannay of Chiswick

Baroness Hodgson of Abinger

Baroness Hussein-Ece

Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead

Lord Sterling of Plaistow

Members present

In the absence of the Chairman, the Bishop of Derby was called to the Chair

_________________________

Examination of Witnesses

Mr Paul Williams, Director, Multilateral Policy Directorate, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and Mr Tom Woodroffe, Head, Office of the Prime Minister’s Special Representative on Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict, Conflict Department, Foreign and Commonwealth Office

The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed for coming to join us. As you know, there are a number of areas about which we would like to talk to you, but I have to give some house notices first. You have a list of interests that have been declared by the Committee Members. This is a formal evidence-taking session. A full note will be taken, which will go on the public record in printed form and on the website. We will send you the transcript and, if you want to suggest any changes or make any corrections to inaccuracies, you are free to do so. The session is also on the record in that it is being webcast live and subsequently will be available on the parliamentary website. If, after the session, you have not been able to share with us all that you would have liked to, you are very welcome to make written submissions. I am asked to remind us all to speak up, so that we can be heard properly. Do not feel that you have to answer every question; if one of you says something and the other agrees, just nod and we can press on to the next question. Thank you for being with us. I am going to ask Baroness Goudie to begin.

Q118 Baroness Goudie: Good afternoon. Nice to see you both again. You started, under then Foreign Secretary Hague, to get the embassies to work with a number of governments, particularly governments who have great influence on the rest of the world on the issue of sexual violence in conflict and other forms of sexual violence. How is that moving on, and what are those countries doing in an attempt to ratify the conventions?

Mr Paul Williams: Thank you very much for the question. First, I thank the Committee for inviting us to speak to you. We are very glad to do so. Your inquiry is very welcome. This issue remains a priority for us in the Foreign Office and the Government, so we welcome your interest in it and look forward to reading your report. On your question about what our embassies have done and how things have moved on since last year, perhaps I can start and my colleague can continue. I think that embassies have played an important role in all this. That started before and certainly during the Global Summit. You might remember the 84-hour global relay around the Global Summit in 2014. Embassies played an important part in that in holding various events to publicise the Summit and what it was trying to achieve around the world. Since then, they have played an important part in monitoring what has been happening in various countries. We rely on their reporting to tell us what is going on. However, their role is not only that. They have helped in planning our visits to countries. Baroness Anelay, since she became the Prime Minister’s Special Representative on PSVI, has visited a number of countries and, of course, embassies help to organise that; they set up contacts and meetings and advise on that. Embassies also have a role in our financial programming. We have been fortunate to have some money to back up our efforts on PSVI and that money is spent largely in-country, so we rely on our embassies to advise on how that money should be spent and to build up local contacts. Perhaps I could hand over to my colleague to talk about individual countries.

Mr Tom Woodroffe: I would add that, very much from the launch, we were clear that while this may have been a UK idea we did not want it to be a UK-only Initiative. It was important for us very quickly to build a broader international coalition behind the work that we were doing. Whether that was through the G8 and then through the Declaration that we launched at the General Assembly in 2013, which 155 countries have now endorsed, it was key that this was seen as a global and international piece of work. Within that process, we identified a number of individual countries with which we worked particularly closely in developing the Declaration that we launched at the General Assembly, as well as in the run-up to the Summit, and which we have colloquially called the PSVI champions. We continue to work closely with them, and Baroness Anelay has just invited them to remain part of the campaign and the Initiative. We work with countries in different ways, depending on their interests—their membership of the Security Council or their membership of the G7, for example. It depends on the context.

Q119 Baroness Hodgson of Abinger: Good afternoon. A very warm welcome to you both and thank you for coming. Following on from that, I understand that at the Summit there were a number of bilateral meetings and that commitments were made by various countries. How easy has that been to follow up, to ensure that what they committed to is actually happening?

Mr Paul Williams: You are right that a number of commitments were made and we have been following up on them. There has been some progress. For example, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which I think some Members of the Committee recently visited, there is an Action Plan for the Congolese army. President Kabila has appointed Madame Mabunda as his Special Representative on sexual violence. In Bosnia, there has recently been a landmark ruling enabling cases to be brought to court and providing compensation to victims. In Kosovo, there have also been changes to the law, and so on. So there has definitely been progress in relation to our embassies around the world, and our partners help us in identifying where progress has been made.

Mr Tom Woodroffe: That is right. There were, as you say, a number of very specific commitments made at the Summit, which we have followed up individually. We have confirmed, for example, that the financial promises that were made at the Summit have been followed through and that the Action Plan that the DRC government committed to has been implemented or its implementation has begun. There is a wider question about monitoring adherence to the more formal declarations that have been part of PSVI, whether that is the G7 Declaration or the Declaration that was launched at the UN General Assembly. It is very welcome that Germany, as the current president of the G7, has just released a report on implementation of the G8 Declaration by G7 Member States—that was released last week on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. While that does not capture everything that each G7 Member State has done, it gives quite a comprehensive overview of action by the G7. The point about the 155 countries is a bit more complicated. We have thought long and hard about the best means of monitoring adherence to the commitments in that Declaration. At the moment, our view remains that an informal process, whereby we monitor implementation through our posts, is certainly less resource-intensive than a formal monitoring mechanism, which would require both money and staff behind it and then might detract from our ability to do other work on the ground.

The Chairman: Is sexual violence in conflict a standing item on G7 agendas, or does it have to come up for particular reasons?

Baroness Goudie: It has to come up, does it not?

Mr Tom Woodroffe: My understanding is that Japan had decided that certainly it wants to continue to have a conversation about sexual violence alongside other issues around Women, Peace and Security, and women’s empowerment more broadly. It is looking at a set of different issues that it will take forward next year.

Lord Sterling of Plaistow: Chairman, I am not sure whether I want to ask for more a bit later, but I would like to get to examples. If I went to one of the embassies in the Congo or any of the African countries where, for argument’s sake, many people sitting where you have been sitting in the past few weeks have said, sadly, that on repeated visits they do not see implementation and that the rule of law is still very difficult to have.

Is an instruction given to the embassy? Is there a person in the embassy who has the specific responsibility of really going out and talking to the local police and army commanders, and observing themselves—old-style embassy work which I remember from the old days—and then coming back with full reports of what has been implemented. Does it go down to that detail?

Mr Paul Williams: I will take the DRC as an example, or just more generally in Africa. Yes, there would be a person tasked with looking at PSVI aspects.

Lord Sterling of Plaistow: Is it a fact? Excuse my bluntness, could we know whether it is a fact?

Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead: We met him. We were in the Congo a few weeks ago.

Lord Sterling of Plaistow: You met people who had that role. Thank you for that. I apologise. Excuse my ignorance.

The Chairman: So you are content on that. I think that Baroness Hussein-Ece will go next.

Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead: The chorus came in together.

Q120 Baroness Hussein-Ece: I have a couple of questions that are linked. First, how does the Government’s prioritisation of human rights—I assume that there is prioritisation of human rights—assist the UK embassies in their work on the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative? Is it embedded, if you like, within the human rights prioritisation?

Mr Paul Williams: Certainly PSVI has a read-across to our human rights work. For example, obviously the promotion of women’s rights, ending discriminatory attitudes to women in general, will help also to prevent sexual violence if it comes to a conflict situation. Similarly, freedom of religion or freedom of expression work can help to prevent conflict, which also helps to prevent sexual violence in conflict.

They are definitely related. However, we have also been clear from the start of our PSVI work that PSVI is also very closely related to our conflict work. For example, it is related to our Women, Peace and Security work. That explains why Tom is the head of a unit within my directorate that is a self-standing unit and sits, therefore, between the conflict department, the human rights and democracy department and our international organisations department—the UN and other organisations. In fact, it relates to all three.

Baroness Hussein-Ece: Thank you for that. Do the Government have priority countries in their work to prevent sexual violence in conflict? What are they, if we have them, and how are they chosen?

Mr Paul Williams: We have countries that we have focused on more than others since the start of PSVI. I can give you a little list—Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burma, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Kosovo, Nepal, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan and Syria. It is a fairly long list, I accept, but shorter than the world. We have chosen those countries on a number of criteria, including partly geographical spread—we did not want all the countries to be in one area—and partly other considerations such as the level of conflict or accessibility, or the presence of the UN, other NGOs, the degree of UK influence and so on. You will be able to tell from that list that various countries fall into those various categories.

Mr Tom Woodroffe: The only thing I would add is that another criterion in drawing up that list was identifying countries from which we could learn lessons that we could apply to others. Countries at a certain stage of their post-conflict development might provide useful experience that we could apply to a country in a more immediate conflict situation.

That list is not exclusive in that we continue to support activity in other countries, whether that is the training of the Malian army or project work in Nigeria or Guatemala, or training on the International Protocol in Uganda. It is not limited only to those countries, but, as Paul says, it is probably where most of our activity is directed.

Baroness Hussein-Ece: Finally, I want to ask to what extent the PSVI agenda is mainstreamed into UK foreign policy.

Mr Paul Williams: I think it is mainstreamed. We have a system within the Foreign Office, and human rights is also mainstreamed. By mainstreaming within the Foreign Office, we mean that country desks are responsible for the delivery of activities within their country on the various priorities that PSVI want. To give you an example of programming, we have a fund at the moment called the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund. It is a cross-Whitehall fund that brings together money that various departments can spend. It has a number of boards, most of which are geographic. The board that I chair is a cross-cutting board called the multilateral board. A fair amount of the money spent on PSVI is therefore spent through the regional boards, because PSVI is integrated into those regional strategies for individual countries.

In terms of mainstreaming across government, we work closely with DfID and the MoD, in particular. You will have heard that part of our response to PSVI is military training, for which obviously the MoD have the lead. In terms of mainstreaming across the world—Tom mentioned this earlier—we are very keen that it is not just a UK initiative but an initiative that many countries take part in.

We welcome the fact that Baroness Anelay has been very active since she took over as the Prime Minister’s Special Representative. She has visited various countries. She also talked about PSVI at the UN General Assembly’s High-Level week in September when she went to New York. Tom and I in our travels raise PSVI with almost everyone we speak to. For example, I was in Japan two or three weeks ago. It is about to go on the Security Council and, as Tom mentioned, about to take over the G7 chair as well. It is interested in Women, Peace and Security and PSVI-type issues, so I raised it with them and we discussed it and so on. We make every effort that we can to mainstream our work.

The Chairman: Is it fair to say that if you are working with DfID and the Ministry of Defence, for instance, you clearly see sexual violence in conflict as being about both human rights issues and conflict prevention, and the need to hold those things together?

Mr Paul Williams: The place that it has in my directorate tells you something about that. It sits between the human rights and democracy department and the conflict department. Of course, there is also a UN and international organisations angle to it. We do see it in that way. We see it as an issue related to conflict and an issue related to human rights.

Q121 Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead: Thanks very much for that, and thank you for being here. One of the issues we continually raise is the importance that we attach to the role of women throughout this whole process and certainly in post-conflict societies. As we see it, the lack of serious engagement with women concerns us very much indeed. I wondered what you were doing to try to ensure that their voices are heard and their interests are represented. Certainly, as regards women in Congo a short while ago, I have been there many times but I could see that nothing really had changed for women and that they were facing enormous pressures and difficulties.

In terms of preventing future outbreaks of sexual violence, do you think we should be doing more—I certainly think we should—to ensure that women have a central role in peace negotiations? The Elders and others are continuously raising the importance that they attach to that, but we still see women excluded. We still see pictures of all men, and not a single woman, sitting around a table discussing what they are going to do for women.

Mr Paul Williams: Thank you. It is a big issue, that one. I will start with another aspect of it. You mentioned peace processes, but of course you also mentioned a sense of impunity. As you know, some of the work that we have been doing on PSVI is about breaking down that sense of impunity. Part of that is about working with survivors, and supporting survivors and encouraging them to come forward. Our work with the International Protocol on the documentation and investigation of PSVI is part of that and part of recording evidence that can be used later in trials. Our work on training judges, for example, is all part of breaking down that sense of impunity as well as amending basic frameworks of legislation.

I think your question goes much wider than that. The question of women’s role in peace processes is very large and, as you may know, the UK has been very active on it over a number of years. There was a Resolution on Women, Peace and Security 15 years ago in the Security Council. It is the UN Security Council Resolution 1325, and we marked the anniversary of that Resolution in October. As part of that, there was a meeting, organised under the Spanish Security Council presidency, to review that Resolution and work on it. The UK went along and made a number of pledges. One of the pledges was indeed to ensure that the voices of women involved in conflict are heard in future UK-hosted peacebuilding events, for example, and to promote women’s participation through political and other support to them.

We are currently following up that pledge, and the Minister, Baroness Anelay, has asked for advice from officials on how we can make concrete that pledge. We are providing her with that advice now. So we will be able to update on that in due course.

Baroness Hodgson of Abinger: Could I just ask a quick supplementary? It did not look as though we have made much progress at the Vienna Conference. I do not know if you saw the picture of the Vienna Conference, but in a room of 21 people there was one woman tucked away at the back of the room. It was all men around the table, which was very disappointing. Is there something that the UK can do to influence when these events are being put together and it is sending people?

The Chairman: Perhaps alongside that, if we come to negotiating peace or transition in Syria, do we have plans to involve women in the negotiations? I think the Committee is asking how we are looking forward on this issue.

Mr Tom Woodroffe: Having worked on this issue for the last 10 or 12 years or so, I could talk for hours about it, but I will not. It is an issue which Baroness Anelay is hugely interested in and very passionate about. We are delighted that we have within the MoD General Messenger as the new Women, Peace and Security champion, which is a reflection of a commitment at the highest levels across government that this is an issue where we can and should be doing a lot more. Certainly when the Minister is here next week I am sure she will be delighted to talk in more detail about the work that she has commissioned, which includes looking at the opportunities coming up around Syria, where we can encourage the inclusion of women, who we need to talk to and how we make that happen. That would not be limited to Syria but would look at other peace processes as well. I do not want to pre-empt what she would say, but I can reassure you that this is at the top of her agenda.

The Chairman: Are we looking at anything like targets? For instance, 30% has been mentioned. If you have targets, at least you try to achieve something. Are we in that bit of the ball park or not?

Mr Tom Woodroffe: It is a piece of work that is currently in train, so I do not think it would be helpful for me to suggest where it might come out. Some targets are associated with certain processes in different countries, but whether we want unilaterally to set targets for ourselves at the moment, I do not know.

Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead: Are you saying that the UK is just not doing enough? That is what it sounds like.

Mr Tom Woodroffe: I think we are doing an awful lot. If you look at the work that we are doing in Afghanistan, for example, the work that we are doing to support the Iraqi implementation of its National Action Plan, or the work that we are doing in other countries around the world, we have done a fair amount on Resolution 1325.

Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead: Still, a lot more could be done.

Mr Tom Woodroffe: I think there is scope to do more. I always think there is always scope to do more on a number of agendas.

Baroness Hussein-Ece: Just a couple of years ago I met some Afghan and Pakistan women MPs. This was before the UK withdrawal. They were very exercised about the fact that women were not really at the table when the discussions were taking place. They were urging us to convey this to the Government. When it comes to discussing the rights of women—women have been treated very badly and still continue to suffer in somewhere like Afghanistan—they are not at the table when it comes to peace talks or talks on how resources are being ring-fenced or not, including DfID money for women. When it comes to these discussions, talks and summits, is there something we can do to say to these countries that we expect to see women leaders at the table and that we are not going to talk just to men on issues that relate to women?

Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead: We are basing this on meeting a lot of Afghan women and so on. The NGOs are bringing lots of women to meet us and to talk about how discontented they are about the opportunities that they are being given.

Mr Tom Woodroffe: The fact that Baroness Anelay has commissioned this piece of work as a follow-up to the High-Level Review reflects the fact that she thinks there is more that we should be doing. That effort can take a number of different forms, including training civil society organisations to be able to participate, lobbying in support of their participation or funding them to be able to participate. She has asked us to look at a whole range of options and apply them in a number of different circumstances to see which we think would be most appropriate and then give her a series of options to look at.

Mr Paul Williams: It might be worth adding that UK action in this area can hopefully help to promote action by others in this area as well. The Minister is very keen on pushing forwards with Women, Peace and Security.

The Chairman: That was a very helpful exchange, which we can note. It all raised questions for us in the Committee about the way in which we mention issues such as quotas.

Lord Sterling of Plaistow: Just to add to this, after Gulf War 2—I was somewhat involved—Lady Greenstock, Sir Jeremy Greenstock’s wife, was formally appointed by Bremer to be responsible for the women of Iraq. I do not know whether you have ever thought of having her here. In practice, she is an example of someone appointed specifically. It was a hugely difficult time for the transitionary council, but she had a specific role. I only bring it up because there have been occasions when someone did have the sense to ask a woman to be involved.

The Chairman: That is very helpful, so thank you.

Mr Paul Williams: As Tom says, you can always do more on these things, but we are not inactive. I think that we already have programmes in Afghanistan and Iraq to support female participation. I am sure that we can write to the Committee on that if you are interested in more information.

The Chairman: That would be very helpful. I am going to move us on and ask Lord Black to ask his question.

Q122 Lord Black of Brentwood: Thank you Lord Chairman. I am going to ask about the International Protocol on the Documentation and Investigation of Sexual Violence in Conflict, which obviously is very important for providing the evidential base for prosecutions. In your evidence back in September, which was very helpful and for which many thanks, there was a suggestion that there would be a further development of this and some revisions to the text. It would be useful to know the process for doing that, and in particular how it would involve local and international organisations.

Mr Paul Williams: First, you are right that the International Protocol is an important document, because it documents cases of sexual violence in a way that can then record the information or helps people to record that information. That then helps transitional justice and prosecution later. It is an important part of PSVI.

You are right, too, that we always saw it as a living document. It has already changed in slight ways. For example, we have translated it into several other languages. It can be used in a locally appropriate way in whichever country it is used. We are also keen to get feedback from the groups, NGOs and so on who use the International Protocol. We have already had some feedback. One person said that it was quite a long document, which it is. Another said that it could be more explicit about sexual violence against men. We want to take that information on board and revise the International Protocol—perfect it, if you like—accordingly. We are thinking about how to do that. It is likely that we will try to get someone from our Team of Experts. As you know, we have a Team of Experts who work through our Stabilisation Unit and help on individual projects on PSVI around the world. We may well ask one of them to look at the International Protocol and collect the feedback to see in what way we think that it could be amended, updated or perfected. Tom, do you want to add anything?

Mr Tom Woodroffe: Not really—just that I accompanied Baroness Anelay when she visited the Democratic Republic of Congo a few months ago, and a number of organisations that we spoke to there which are using it had some very useful suggestions about how it could be a little more user-friendly for those operating on the ground. It is quite a large document and contains quite a lot of detail, so there is certainly scope to look at how you can revise the totality of it and whether there are other forms of it that you could similarly produce and use in different ways. There may be scope to think more creatively. Perhaps you could have some electronic form of protocol, which might be more accessible to those operating in certain circumstances.

There are a range of different options that we need to look at. As Paul says, we have always been very clear since we launched it that it would be an ongoing process of review.

Q123 Baroness Hodgson of Abinger: The National Security Strategy and the SDSR states that the Government will expand their PSVI reach and implementation, focusing on Iraq and Syria. How will this be achieved, and what impact will it have on the current PSVI priorities?

Mr Paul Williams: The PSVI is of course an element of our response to ISIL, and you are right that there was a section in the SDSR—the Strategic Defence and Security Review—that talked about PSVI in that context. Ministers have agreed that we should try to focus our work in Iraq and Syria on several areas. One is increased documentation and evidence-gathering. Another is increased support for survivors. We are also supporting MoD efforts to try to mainstream sexual violence within coalition military training, for example. Also, of course, when we get there, there will be the participation of women, which we have already talked about. We are trying to develop that work now. Baroness Anelay has already launched the International Protocol; we have already launched it in Iraq. We are now looking at whether we can translate it into Kurdish; we have already translated it into Arabic. We are also looking ahead to the pledging conference on Syria next February and at whether there can be a PSVI element to that. So, yes, we are expanding our PSVI reach and looking at what we can do in Iraq and Syria, and this is one area that Baroness Anelay has been interested in.

Mr Tom Woodroffe: Paul talked earlier about the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund. There is a huge opportunity there to look at how we can design and implement programming that runs over a number of years that is supported by our broader CSSF programming in that part of the world. For us, that is going to be quite an exciting opportunity.

Lord Hannay of Chiswick: I wanted, if I could, to follow up those replies. There are two points that I would like to ask you about. First, on the Security Review, I have to say that I thought it was a bit thin on this subject. It was very short and very general, and there were no specifics. Could you perhaps explain why, since this is such a high priority for the Government, there are not more specific objectives in a review that after all covers five years?

Secondly, I looked, but failed to find, in the Review, and pretty well anywhere else, a clear statement of the Government’s objectives with regard to PSVI in the context of the World Humanitarian Summit next year, which seems to me—perhaps you will tell me I am wrong—a really important moment at which to try to achieve a bit more, both in implementation and perhaps in concepts. Could you say something about that, too?

Mr Paul Williams: There was a section on PSVI in the Strategic Defence and Security Review. As I recall, it fell within a section on the rules-based international system, which talked about many things, including the UN and the various other multilateral and other groupings. I think it was a good section that talked about the importance of PSVI. It mentioned Iraq and Syria—those areas where we could do more—so within a document that covers all defence and security, I think it was good to get in a section on PSVI. It now gives us a hook on which to take that work forward on PSVI.

On the World Humanitarian Summit, we look at all opportunities to try to take our work forward on PSVI. The Summit is taking place next year, so we are starting to think about what can feature in it, and in that context we will certainly think about PSVI. Do you have anything specific at the moment to say about that, Tom?

Mr Tom Woodroffe: I think Baroness Anelay wrote to the Committee last week in response to a request for more information on the PSVI objectives for the World Humanitarian Summit. I do not know whether Committee Members have had an opportunity to see that letter yet, but we are certainly working very closely with the Department for International Development, which is the lead department on the World Humanitarian Summit, to ensure that what we want to do on PSVI is complementary to its broader objectives in relation to women and girls and the prevention of violence against women and girls in humanitarian settings.

For PSVI, one of the more obvious objectives for us is encouraging more States to endorse the Call to Action on preventing violence against women and girls in emergency situations, which was launched at the Summit by the Department for International Development and which has subsequently been taken on by the US and now Sweden, which is leading it for this year. Another is encouraging States in endorsing that to announce new commitments that they will make to tackle sexual violence against women and girls in humanitarian settings. The issue with the World Humanitarian Summit, as I understand it, is that it is a very complicated negotiating process leading up to next year. We are waiting for a report from the Secretary-General, which he will issue in January, which will both set out the framework of the Summit and make a series of recommendations for possible outcomes. Once that comes through, we will have a clearer sense of where PSVI will sit alongside that, alongside the work of DfID, as I say, and more broadly.

Lord Hannay of Chiswick: Forgive me for saying so, but if you want the Secretary-General to say something useful, it is best to talk to him about it in advance and not wait for him to produce his report.

Mr Tom Woodroffe: I fully agree, which is why the UK has been very actively involved in the process leading up to the issuing of the report through the various consultation meetings that have taken place, including the one that took place in Geneva a few weeks ago, where we have very much made clear what our broader objectives for the World Humanitarian Summit are, alongside other Member States, civil society organisations and other groups contributing to that process, and we hope that they will indeed be reflected in the SG’s report.

Q124 The Chairman: I just want to push us on. We need to finish at 4.30 pm, as you know, and we have two more questions that we would like to ask. As a matter of fact, the letter that you referred to arrived yesterday, so we will read it and then be up to speed.

In your written evidence, you outlined the role that embassies play in monitoring commitments such as those made in the UN General Assembly Declaration on ending sexual violence in conflict. I would like you to comment briefly on how effective that monitoring is. Are there monitoring mechanisms that you favour and want to develop? Are there non-UK monitoring mechanisms out there that we can benefit from?

Mr Paul Williams: You are right that in our evidence we are committed to maintaining the momentum started by the G8 and other declarations, and to encouraging implementation and commitment. We mentioned a bit earlier in the session that we rely very much on our embassies to help us with reporting on that. But of course it is not just our embassies; we also talk to partner countries and other countries. I mentioned various trips that I have had, and that Baroness Anelay and Tom have had, and so on, where we discussed PSVI and swap information.

The Declaration of Commitment has been signed by 155 countries, which is a lot to monitor in a formal process. At the moment, I think we favour an informal process of the sort that we currently have. Moving away from that, we would have to balance effort, cost and result a little in what extra information it would bring us beyond the information sources we have at the moment.

The Chairman: How are you gathering that to give a kind of focus on where we are getting to with the monitoring process? How do you gather all those things and give us a sense of where we are at, and the most immediate challenge?

Mr Paul Williams: That is for Tom.

Mr Tom Woodroffe: We do it in different ways, really. We talked earlier about ensuring implementation of the Summit commitments. Through a formal process, we went out and commissioned our embassies and high commissions to find out whether governments had delivered on what they said they would do. It is a little bit the same on the commitments in the Declaration. At various points we asked key embassies or key high commissions for updates on what their governments are doing on PSVI, or they would voluntarily feed back. We get the information in different ways.

Lord Sterling of Plaistow: I just want to follow that up. You talked about 155 different countries just now. When we talked about this a few weeks ago, you said that many countries have signed up, but how many have actually ratified? You said just now that 155 is quite a lot to cover. If there is impetus and the wish to cover it, it can be covered, but if they have not even ratified it, to what extent does one expect that they have done something?

The Chairman: Do we know how many countries have ratified?

Mr Tom Woodroffe: Ratification implies a legal process, which is not appropriate for the form of document it is. It is a voluntary declaration of commitment or a statement of principles.

Mr Paul Williams: If you like, we are saying that 155 countries have endorsed the Declaration.

The Chairman: Just one more question, from Baroness Kinnock.

Q125 Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead: Thanks very much. I was interested in reading about the new cross-Whitehall joint UN Peacekeeping Policy Unit—a rather long description—which is of course intended to end impunity for peacekeepers, and the sorts of concerns that we have had recently, particularly because it has exposed the very bad behaviour of which they have been guilty. Could you tell us a bit more about the role of that Unit, and how far down the road of achieving some success you are?

Mr Paul Williams: You are right: that Unit was mentioned in the SDSR, which Lord Hannay referred to earlier. It will be set up and will sit within the Foreign Office. It will join up the Foreign Office team there at the moment with some MoD resource to try to get a clearer, cross-government picture of UN peacekeeping policy. As part of that, of course, it will be interested in sexual exploitation and abuse. It will continue the work that the UK has been doing in that area.

Obviously, all instances of sexual exploitation and abuse by UN peacekeepers are completely unacceptable. Therefore, we fully support the UN Secretary-General’s policy of zero tolerance on sexual exploitation and abuse. We are also one of the countries that try to bring up this issue in the UN. To give an example of how we have done that, we agreed some language at the spring session of the Administrative and Budgetary Committee, the Fifth Committee, of the UN General Assembly. A cross-cutting Resolution was agreed on peacekeeping, including some language on sexual exploitation and abuse, which was about strengthening the Secretary-General’s hand in implementing his zero tolerance policy.

It might also be worth mentioning that the UK is increasing its own peacekeeping contribution. We will be sending troops to Somalia and South Sudan as part of the pledge that we made at the UN General Assembly and in the SDSR. We of course hope that those troops can provide an example of the kind of behaviour that is expected from UN troops on peacekeeping duty. It is an issue that remains very important to us and we continue to press in the UN to try to get the number of cases of sexual exploitation abuse down to zero.

Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead: Very quickly, they have got away with impunity for a long time. I understand what you are saying, but I think we will be facing a really long-term, very difficult and acrimonious problem. If all does seem to fail, what then? Do we talk about prosecuting for crimes? What kind of options are there down the road to deal with this appalling behaviour?

The Chairman: Perhaps there even needs to be the setting up some kind of international tribunal to look at these cases.

Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead: That is what I meant by prosecution.

Mr Paul Williams: I appreciate that we are running out of time so maybe this is something we need to write on as well. There are several aspects to this. First, there is an aspect of training of peacekeepers before they go on duty and while they are on duty. Secondly, there is an issue of command. It has to come from the top that this is unacceptable behaviour—both from the UN and from force commanders on the ground. Thirdly, there is an issue of investigation. It is very important that all cases are followed up and investigated in a suitable timeframe. That is one of the key points that we continue to press.

Lord Hannay of Chiswick: Prosecution is the one that is missing. Your enumeration goes all the way until you stop just before prosecution. As we all know, the troop contributors do nothing. The countries in which the troops are deployed do not have suitable legal systems to try these people. That is why Baroness Kinnock and the Chairman are asking about what you are thinking about the possibility of some kind of international tribunal under UN auspices to try these cases in a proper way.

The Chairman: We understand the constraints of time and we have other witnesses coming. We might just clarify some of these questions that we have raised right at the end. It would be very helpful to our process if you could give us a written response. I thank you both very much for coming and talking with us. We will finish this session now. Thank you very much indeed.