A/HRC/36/50/Add.1 ultimately of social integration. For victims, it becomes an arena for claims-raising, the core of the idea of rights-holding.20 28. Transitional justice has sought to put victims at the centre of its efforts, with the aims of providing recognition, fostering trust and strengthening the democratic rule of law. It is not just that victims have been central to pushing the government — often in highly visible, public ways — to adopt transitional justice, nor that on account of this and the very fact of victimization they, normatively, deserve to be included in the design and implementation of transitional justice measures, although all of this is true. The point is that, as a practical matter, the possibility of achieving the aims of transitional justice depends upon finding successful ways of giving victims a space in the public sphere. 29. One significant innovation has been the development of consultation or dialogue processes that precede and inform the development of transitional justice measures. National consultations, such as those that have taken place in Burundi, Colombia, Sri Lanka and Tunisia, send victims and society at large a powerful message of inclusion and ultimately empower them.21 2. Gender sensitivity and inclusion 30. Another cross-cutting advance concerns the creation of specific strategies to address the rights and participation of women and to integrate a gender perspective into transitional justice measures. These innovations are critical given the facts that women are less likely than men to come forward concerning abuses they have experienced, and that the kinds and consequences of human rights abuses suffered by men and women are often different. 22 31. At the core of this contribution is the idea of ensuring that gender-based crimes are included in, for example, the mandates of truth commissions and in reparations policies as prosecutable offences. This includes the pivotal recognition of rape as a crime against humanity and a war crime through the work of the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Tribunal for Rwanda. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court has gone further, including not only rape, but other genderbased crimes, such as sexual slavery, forced pregnancy, enforced prostitution and enforced sterilization. 32. Transitional justice measures have taken steps over the years to enhance inclusion. Many institutions, following the lead of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the first one to establish a gender unit, have adopted an explicit institutional approach to gender, either the establishment of a central gender unit or a cross-cutting approach to gender, dedicated staff with experience with gender-based violence and an outreach strategy for women victims. Reparations programmes have become more sensitive to gender — including expanding the list of harms eligible for benefits and making the benefits themselves responsive to differences in men’s and women’s needs. 33. Practitioners have pushed for creative ways to link transitional justice to structural transformation, by aligning it with positive legal and social changes to enhance the status of women in relation to property ownership, inheritance, marital rights and more. 34. Although progress at the level of design is not necessarily equivalent to progress at the level of implementation, nowadays it would be impossible to engage seriously in transitional justice work without heeding gender considerations. 3. Fact-finding and documentation 35. A final advance that also contributes across the four elements of the mandate concerns improvements in fact-finding and documentation, which are often conducted by civil society organizations and which provide critical information for a wide variety of 20 21 22 8 Ibid. A/HRC/34/62 and A/71/567. UN-Women, “A window of opportunity: making transitional justice work for women”, October 2012 2nd ed., pp. 11-12.