In its renewal of the mandate of the United Nations Regional Office for Central Africa (UNOCA), the Council should ensure that the rights and concerns of women are addressed across all sectors of UNOCA’s focus, including in particular efforts to strengthen mediation, early warning and conflict prevention, and justice and security sector reform efforts regionally. In addition, UNOCA should work with regional and national actors to strengthen human rights institutions and the justice system in order to ensure perpetrators of human rights violations and abuses receive justice, and further, that effective measures to prevent such abuses, such as those seen in Angola, the DRC, and Burundi, are adopted and fully implemented. Specific areas for the Security Council to address include:

• Continue to express concern about human rights violations, including violations of women’s rights; raising specific cases where appropriate, and urging authorities to take effective action to bring the perpetrators to justice and prevent further violations;
• Call on respective governments to publish any outstanding reports of commissions of inquiry, including the inquiry on the September 2011 Gatumba attack;
• Provide support to the respective justice systems to strengthen capacity and access to justice; and
• Ensure that support provided to military or police, whether in the form of technical assistance or training, includes a strong human rights training component with practical as well as theoretical application, and a strong gender component

In its renewal of the mandate of the United Nations Regional Office for Central Africa (UNOCA), the Council should ensure that the rights and concerns of women are addressed across all sectors of UNOCA’s focus, including in particular efforts to strengthen mediation, early warning and conflict prevention, and justice and security sector reform efforts regionally. In addition, UNOCA should work with regional and national actors to strengthen human rights institutions and the justice system in order to ensure perpetrators of human rights violations and abuses receive justice, and further, that effective measures to prevent such abuses, such as those seen in Angola, the DRC, and Burundi, are adopted and fully implemented. Specific areas for the Security Council to address include:

• Continue to express concern about human rights violations, including violations of women’s rights; raising specific cases where appropriate, and urging authorities to take effective action to bring the perpetrators to justice and prevent further violations;
• Call on respective governments to publish any outstanding reports of commissions of inquiry, including the inquiry on the September 2011 Gatumba attack;
• Provide support to the respective justice systems to strengthen capacity and access to justice; and
• Ensure that support provided to military or police, whether in the form of technical assistance or training, includes a strong human rights training component with practical as well as theoretical application, and a strong gender component