rights advocates have an important role to play in raising such awareness and in educating legal and judicial officers in the course of litigating sexual violence. Wide and varied strategies could be employed with different degrees of success in pursuit of the overall goal of justice to victims or survivors of sexual violence. A criminal prosecution could potentially hold the perpetrator accountable for sexual violence. However, criminal prosecution makes the victim or the survivor a witness to the often lengthy legal drama between the State and the perpetrator and has no or a limited (in civil legal systems) role to play as a witness in the process. A civil suit too may take a long time but the victim may end up being compensated for the harm she suffered and therefore may feel vindicated sooner than in a criminal process. In any litigation strategies that the rights advocate employs, using decisions of the international human rights treaty bodies or jurisprudence of the international courts and tribunals may strengthen the case and drive home the point of sexual violence as an important breach of basic and fundamental rights. Additionally, it may also educate about the State’s non-compliance with its international obligations and may hold the State accountable for failure to exercise due diligence. That sexual violence can also amount to torture is another important lesson that judicial officers in national legal systems need to learn from the international human rights standards and apply to cases before them. Women and human rights advocates in Africa and elsewhere are already engaged in the strategies discussed in this Manual individually or separately. Putting it all together in one document helps give a broad sense of all the available strategies and the potential and limitations of each one of them, thereby helping decide which are best suited for a case or a situation at hand. In the course of doing so, the key decisions and judgments referred to highlight the developments made in international law on justice for sexual violence. Appropriate, adequate, accurate and complete documentation and evidence are important to fully explore all available domestic remedies and eventually to access regional and international mechanisms. Finally, advocacy and campaigns have tremendous potential to bring developments in international law to bear in national laws and policies to redress sexual violence. For ultimately, it is the easy access to justice and possibility of effective remedy at the local and national level that victims and survivors need to ensure justice and accountability for sexual violence. REDRESS | CONCLUSION 81