But a model for success is 450 miles away in the city of
Hargeisa, the capital of a region of Somalia known as Somaliland. Mulvey has
seen the one-stop system work there—she helped set it up. When Mulvey arrived in
Hargeisa in 2007, as an adviser to the United Nations Development
Programme’s Rule of Law program, she found herself in a country where the
obstacles to prosecuting sexual assault were many, and resources she could
apply to doing so were few. Somalia was in the midst of a civil war; sexual
violence, as in Mogadishu today, was frequent, and punishment for such crimes
was rare.
Sexual assaults were rarely even reported. Absent a
straightforward legal mechanism for prosecuting cases, seeking justice falls to
the survivor's family, which seeks restitution from the family of the
perpetrator based on Xeer, a traditional legal system that dates back
centuries. Read Full Article
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