Congolese surgeon Dr. Denis Mukwege vowed to continue seeking justice for the victims of sex slavery, rape and sexual violence during his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on Monday. 

Mukwege is a 63-year-old gynecological surgeon who has fought to protect women living in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for two decades. 

His hands have mended tens of thousands of women and girls who survived sexual assault. Since the military conflict erupted in East DRC in 1995, women were used to deter male resistance. Soldiers took women from villages and brutally raped them because they could. 

One woman, he recalled, was brought into his office with gunshot wounds to her genitalia. 

"She hadn't just been raped," he told CNN in October when he was announced a Nobel winner. "They had also shot at her genitals. I had never seen anything like it. I thought it must be an exceptional case, the act of a madman. I couldn't imagine that it would become the work I do for probably the rest of my life."

He has called for the prosecution of wartime rapists who prey on women. Women in small villages have no protection leaving them vulnerable to harm from foreign armies, militias and more. 

“The Congolese people have been humiliated, abused and massacred for more than two decades in plain sight of the international community,” Dr. Mukwege said. “I call upon you not only to award this Nobel Peace Prize to my country’s people, but to stand up and together say loudly: ‘The violence in the D.R.C., it’s enough! Enough is enough! Peace, now!’ ”

Nadia Murad, the other 2018 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, is a 25-year-old Yazidi activist was forced into sex slavery by the Islamic State when her village was taken over in 2014. After escaping to freedom, she now advocates on behalf of the Yazidi community, a minority ethno-religious group in Iraq who have been the most vulnerable to ISIS attacks.

Approximately 3,000 Yazidi women and children were sold into slavery and raped during ISIS' reign, according to The New York Times. Murad has appealed to the United Nations to provide special protections to the cultural group, but the U.N. has failed to heed her pleas.  

“It is inconceivable that the conscience of the leaders of 195 countries around the world is not mobilized to liberate these girls,” she said during the ceremony. “What if they were a commercial deal, an oil field or a shipment of weapons? Most certainly, no efforts would be spared to liberate them.”

“I did not know anything about the Nobel Peace Prize," she added. "I knew nothing about the conflicts and killings that took place in our world every day. I did not know that human beings could perpetrate such hideous crimes against each other.”

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Dr. Denis MukwegeNadia Murad