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Exclusive interview with the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences, Mrs Reem Alsalem

This interview led by Grégor Puppinck, ECLJ Director, is focused on her report: Prostitution and violence against women and girls (A/HRC/56/48 — 7 May 2024)

 

Video excerpt:

Reem Alsalem: Pornog­ra­phy is filmed pros­ti­tu­tion, and in my report I demon­strat­ed that pros­ti­tu­tion is a sys­tem of exploita­tion and vio­lence against women and girls: it is very gen­dered, it pre­dom­i­nant­ly affects females, and it is per­pe­trat­ed by males.

Pornog­ra­phy oper­ates in the same way; it has the same modus operan­di, the same per­pe­tra­tors of vio­lence, the same exploita­tion, and the same con­se­quences in terms of all forms of vio­lence inflict­ed on women and girls—in terms of being exploit­ed by pimps. Being a vic­tim is not some­thing undig­ni­fied; on the con­trary, being a vic­tim is a legal term that means you have been sub­ject­ed to gross vio­la­tions of human rights, and you are enti­tled to assis­tance, pro­tec­tion, and reparations.

So, this is why I say they are victims—that they have, we have, an oblig­a­tion, and states have an oblig­a­tion to assist.

Gré­gor Pup­pinck: So, Madame Reem Alsalem, wel­come to Stras­bourg. Thank you. We are very pleased to wel­come you here at the Europe Cen­ter for Jus­tice in Stras­bourg. It’s a great and a real plea­sure and hon­or to have you with us. You are the cur­rent UN Spe­cial Rap­por­teur on Vio­lence against Women and Girls since 2020. You are from Jor­dan, and you are most often trav­el­ing, often in Gene­va at the Unit­ed Nations. You have a man­date giv­en by the Human Rights Coun­cil, which is a body of states in charge of human rights based in Gene­va, depend­ing on the Unit­ed Nations. So, you are part of the UN human rights sys­tem and are the UN expert on vio­lence against women and girls.

Thank you very much. It’s a very impor­tant top­ic. Cur­rent­ly, it’s also an impor­tant top­ic for our orga­ni­za­tion. You have pub­lished recent­ly reports on var­i­ous issues, includ­ing the mat­ter of pros­ti­tu­tion; you’re also work­ing on pornog­ra­phy, issues of dig­ni­ty, human traf­fick­ing against women, especially.

We would like to first give you the pos­si­bil­i­ty to explain to the peo­ple what this date is, what its pur­pose is, and more impor­tant­ly, why do you choose to address such dif­fi­cult ques­tions as pornog­ra­phy and prostitution?

Reem Alsalem: Well, first of all, thank you very much for hav­ing me. This is my first time in Stras­bourg, which I regret—I should have come a long time ago because, of course, the Coun­cil of Europe and, in par­tic­u­lar, the body that mon­i­tors the imple­men­ta­tion of the Istan­bul Con­ven­tion, is a very impor­tant part­ner. Of course, I also fol­low very much what the Euro­pean Court of Human Rights says, but also the Assem­bly, the Par­lia­men­tary Assem­bly, the debates, and the poli­cies. So, real­ly, a plea­sure to be here.

The Human Rights Coun­cil of the Unit­ed Nations is like the kitchen where human rights pol­i­cy gets cooked. It was pre­ced­ed by the Human Rights Com­mis­sion, which is the one actu­al­ly that cre­at­ed my man­date. My man­date is very old—last year, we cel­e­brat­ed 30 years of the man­date. It is actu­al­ly one of the old­est spe­cial pro­ce­dures that exist.

I’m not a staff mem­ber, actu­al­ly, of the Unit­ed Nations. A lot of peo­ple mis­un­der­stand that—they think I’m an offi­cial who has a paid salary that reports to our Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al, Anto­nio Guter­res, of the Unit­ed Nations. But that is not the case. I’m an inde­pen­dent expert, appoint­ed by the Coun­cil by virtue of my exper­tise to work on issues of pre­vent­ing vio­lence against women and girls. The man­date, for per­haps the longest time, was vio­lence against women, and I believe two years ago, the man­date was expand­ed to include also vio­lence against girls.

And that is some­thing I request­ed because we always speak about a con­tin­u­um of violence—that vio­lence against women, par­tic­u­lar­ly struc­tur­al vio­lence, misog­y­ny, and harm­ful social norms, does not start affect­ing females when they become adults. Yes, they often start from some­times from birth, some­times even before birth, and into adulthood.

So I have a very big port­fo­lio, which is to work with all stake­hold­ers, but par­tic­u­lar­ly states, in order to pre­vent vio­lence. As you know, vio­lence has reached epi­dem­ic lev­els. This has been acknowl­edged, of course, and it’s been exac­er­bat­ed by many crises we’ve seen, espe­cial­ly in the last decade. We’ve seen an esca­la­tion of human­i­tar­i­an crises, cli­mate change, aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures, and eco­nom­ic hard­ship. And how states are also, let’s say, reduc­ing bud­gets and atten­tion ded­i­cat­ed to vul­ner­a­ble groups, includ­ing women and vic­tims of vio­lence in general.

The needs are increas­ing, but resources are decreas­ing. So I do my work through var­i­ous ways: I write the­mat­ic reports (you referred to one of them—we’re going to speak about it now). I also write let­ters to gov­ern­ments, but also non-state actors, busi­ness­es, mil­i­tary groups, on behalf of vic­tims of suf­fer­ing vio­lence. I remind these stake­hold­ers of their human rights oblig­a­tions. These let­ters become public—they are pub­lished. If we receive a response, that response is also pub­lished, so any­one any­where in the world can see the feed­back we received.