Angelina is a special envoy of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and has launched the Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative (PSVI) in 2012 with William Hague, who was the foreign secretary.
She wrote in the Guardian today, she said: “There has been some progress … but it has not been nearly enough to meet the needs of survivors, or to deter perpetrators from using rape as a weapon of war in almost every new conflict in the past decade".
“Despite the commitments governments made, we have not seen significant, lasting action at the global level. This is deeply painful and frustrating.”
“We meet and discuss these horrors and agree that they should never be allowed to happen again. We promise to draw – and to hold – that line".
“But when it comes to hard choices about how to implement these promises, we run into the same problems time and again. We run into some security council members abusing their veto power, such as in the case of Syria. We run into economic and political interests being put first, treating some conflicts as more important than others. And we run into a lack of political will, meaning that governments in recent years have downgraded the importance of efforts to combat war-zone sexual violence, despite the direct link to international peace and security.”