Rape in Armed Conflict

Lord Lester of Herne Hill Excerpts

Wednesday 9th January 2013 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Lester of Herne Hill]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their strategy for ensuring that United Kingdom government-funded medical care for women and girls impregnated by rape in armed conflict is non-discriminatory and includes abortion services where they are medically necessary in compliance with international humanitarian law.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, the next debate is timed and the timing is very tight. Would noble Lords who have six minutes to speak make sure that they sit down as the clock hits six—or, preferably, momentarily before—to ensure that the Minister has as much time as possible to reply to the points raised in this important debate?

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[Lord Lester of Herne Hill]

My Lords, the central question that this debate seeks to clarify is the Government’s strategy for ensuring that UK-funded medical care for women and girls impregnated by rape in armed conflict is non-discriminatory and includes the provision of safe abortion services where medically appropriate and necessary. This is the Government’s obligation under international humanitarian law, including the medical mandates of the Geneva conventions. Despite these legal mandates and the life and health-threatening nature of many pregnancies arising out of war rape, girls and women raped in armed conflict are routinely denied safe abortions in humanitarian medical settings, including those funded by DfID.

I am grateful to the international NGO, Global Justice Centre, and its dynamic president, Janet Benshoof, and her staff, for providing me with background information for this debate. I am also grateful to the Minister and her advisers for meeting me to discuss the issues in depth. The Minister has a strong commitment to equality for women and respect for international humanitarian law. I look forward to her reply, which may be influential well beyond this country and enable the UK to provide strong international leadership.

Sexual violence against women is a global evil. In its most pernicious form, rape of girls and women is used as a weapon of choice in the majority of today’s armed conflicts. All rapes are terrible, but rape used as a weapon of war is often fatal. About 70% of conflict-related rapes in the DRC are gang rapes, most accompanied by mutilating injuries to women, including deliberate HIV infection. One-third of the victims of war rape in the DRC are girls under the age of 18 and, as many are raped in the context of sexual slavery, they incur the greatest risk of pregnancy.

Girls and women subject to rape used as a weapon of war are persons “wounded and sick” in armed conflict, guaranteed absolute rights to non-discriminatory, appropriate and necessary medical care under the Geneva conventions. Yet these women war victims are routinely denied, by blanket exclusions, life and health-saving abortions in humanitarian settings, leaving them with the terrible “choice” of risking an unsafe abortion, suicide or being forced to bear the child of their rapists.

War rape is torture. Denying a rape victim an abortion when there is medical need is also capable of amounting to a form of torture. In a recent statement, the World Organisation Against Torture, the largest global network of NGOs working against torture, said:

“To prevent a rape victim from access to abortion is contrary to the absolute prohibition of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”.

The right at stake is not a right to abortion; it is the right of everyone “wounded and sick” in armed conflicts, including women, to appropriate and necessary life and health-saving medical care. Plastic surgery, blood transfusions, amputations, prostheses, dental treatment and penile reconstruction surgery are all medical procedures protected by international law when needed by persons “wounded and sick” in armed conflict. The same applies, or should apply, to the termination of pregnancies where the continuing of a pregnancy creates a serious risk to the life and physical and mental health of the raped woman or girl.

Why are women raped in war being denied access to appropriate and necessary medical care by means of safe abortions where the continuation of the pregnancy threatens the life and health of the woman or girl? Two powerful forces perpetuate the anti-abortion medical protocols and sweepingly broad exclusions imposed on the provision of healthcare to women raped in war—the United States Government and the ICRC, the International Committee of the Red Cross. The United States imposes a “no abortion” total ban in its foreign aid, requiring all recipients, including foreign Governments, the ICRC and UN entities, to pledge not to discuss abortion or provide abortions with US funds. The US has eliminated previously existing exceptions allowing abortions for rape or to save the life of the woman.

The United States and the UK largely fund the same humanitarian organisations. Only one of the top 10 recipients of DfID humanitarian funding, the World Health Organisation, segregates its US funds from DfID and other donor funds to ensure the integrity of its abortion-related work. The ICRC, whose largest single donor is the United States, is clear in its internal operational guidelines for ICRC staff treating women victims of sexual violence in armed conflict that its medical staff “do not perform abortions”. The guidelines further discourage abortion referrals on the ground that making such referrals might impair the reputation of the ICRC in the conflict country.

The ICRC is DfID’s partner of choice in conflict situations and the largest recipient of DfID aid to humanitarian organisations. I was one of 43 British parliamentarians, including three former leaders of my party, who wrote to President Obama in February 2012 recalling the absolute rights of girls and women raped in war to non-discriminatory care, including abortions, under the Geneva and torture conventions. We requested the President to lift the US abortion ban on aid to war victims. To date, he has not yet done so. Denying medically needed abortions for victims of rape in war, including girls targeted for forced pregnancy as an element of genocide, is barbaric. Our Government should fill the vacuum of global leadership on this issue by ensuring that DfID’s humanitarian aid advances, and does not undermine, the rights of women raped in war to non-discriminatory medical care, which includes abortions.

The issue has been raised in Parliament since 2010. The Government have expressed their concerns about the US abortion ban, noting that it now prohibits abortions in cases of rape or to save a woman’s life. However, the Government appear neither to have taken steps to ensure in practice that UK funds are not used to support facilities that provide discriminatory care for women raped in war, nor requested the US to lift the ban on victims of war rape.

DfID’s aid programme apparently defers to local anti-abortion laws. This breaches the UK’s international humanitarian law obligations when the aid is supporting medical care for war victims. DfID-funded humanitarian entities such as the ICRC do not even provide abortions for war rape victims in conflict countries where abortions are legal for rape victims, as in the Sudan.

The Minister’s Written Answers and those of the honourable Lynne Featherstone MP on this issue are inconsistent about whether international humanitarian law is trumped by incompatible national law. Time prevents me from citing the inconsistent answers but I have given the references to my noble friend the Minister. I ask her to clarify the apparent contradiction in those answers and to explain the following points: first, how DfID policy implements UK law, as set out in the UK military manual, that national laws are relevant in conflict situations only so far as they do not conflict with international humanitarian law mandates; secondly, whether DfID monitoring or assessments of the performance of funded humanitarian entities includes, when applicable, assessing their compliance with the medical mandates of international humanitarian law; thirdly, whether DfID is engaged in any discussions with the ICRC on the question of the ICRC segregating its compromised US funding from that of DfID and other donors to provide abortions for war victims, or whether in any other way the ICRC can ensure that women war rape victims treated by the ICRC are able to have access to abortion services from non-ICRC medical providers. Fourthly, do the Government have any plans to make a request to President Obama to lift the abortion ban on women raped in armed conflict as a matter of US compliance with the Geneva conventions?

Finally, can the Minister confirm that excluding access to abortions for women raped in war where such medical treatment is appropriate and necessary is discriminatory and likely to breach the Geneva conventions and, most important, that international humanitarian law takes precedence over conflicting national laws which authorise torture or serious ill treatment by banning medically necessary abortions for the victims of rape in armed conflict?