195. In the aforementioned Sudan case, the Commission noted that any act of sexual and gender-based violence, is an act of gender-based discrimination, irrespective of whether men in the same situation were treated the same way as women or not. The African Women's Protocol by its very nature and tenor guarantees substantive transformative equality not just formal equality. Under it, states have the responsibility to prevent, regulate, control, investigate, punish and provide effective remedies. Reparations under the Protocol including individual reparations and reparations targeted at systematic failures. 196. The core of formal equality as e)Shibited in the Comparator test is that women and men are similarly situated. This, as the Complainants point out, is a fallacy which fails to account for structural differences between men and women. It is now widely accepted that while_formal equality guarantees the same treatment for everyone, there are various intersecting factors such as sex, age, race and disability that make it difficult to attain equality even when people are treated the same way. 128 The CEDAW Committee has stipulated that "It is not enough to guarantee women treatment that is identical to that of men. Rather, biological as well as socially and culturally constructed differences between women and men must be taken into account." 129 In addition, it has been propounded that formal equality, an Aristotlean formulation 130 cannot produce social equality under conditions of real social inequality as it was never meant for that, rather it was meant to" eliminate destabilizing conflict among polis members who were already structurally a presumptively eqt1al elite: prominent adult Greek male citizens." 131 197. Substantive equality, which emerged as consequence of the criticisms above is itself a stubborn concept, one that has proven hard to tie down to a sole definition. However, at its most basic formulation recognises that men and women 128 CEDAW Committee (2004) General recommendation No. 25: Article 4, paragr special measures) Para 8; (Chekera-Radu (2017) "The relevance of substantive eq rights system' s jurisprudence to women's land and property rights" 1 (hltps://www.a hry .up.a .za/ i111age /a11rv/volu mel/ he kerd .pcl f ) page49 129 (2004) Gen ral recommendation No. 25: Article 4, paragraph 1, of the Conventi orary uman rbook ) para 8 130 See Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Modern Libra same trea tment of similar persons"); and Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, e David Ross, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 1131a-1131b 13 1 Mackinnon, C.A (2020) "Equality" Daedalus (hit s: www .a n1c1 ·ad.o r (2016) "Sex Equality" 3rd ed . (New York: Foundation) 50 in the ; See also