STATEMENT BY JEAN-PIERRE LACROIX, UNDER-SECRETARY-GENERAL
SECURITY COUNCIL BRIEFING
New York
14 NOVEMBER 2023
I thank you, Sir, for convening this briefing. I am very pleased to be joined today by the Police Adviser Advisor and the Police Commissioners from our peacekeeping operations in the Central African Republic and South Sudan, as well as the Executive Director of Security Council Report.
We deeply appreciate the Security Council’s recognition of United Nations peacekeeping as one of the most effective tools available to the United Nations in the promotion and maintenance of international peace and security. All of us gathered here today — Member States, Council members, host countries and military, police and financial contributors — have a stake in the performance and success of peacekeeping operations. At a time when multilateralism and peacekeeping are facing significant challenges, the onus remains on all of us to continue to be proactive to enhance and adapt the tool of peacekeeping. Many challenges to global peace, security and development today, such as a global decline in respect for the rule of law, corruption, disregard for international law, transnational organized crime, attacks on human rights and the shrinking of the civic space, call for unique and specific policing responses. We must work collectively to ensure that the United Nations police (UNPOL) is properly prepared, equipped and resourced to address those challenges.
I salute the service and dedication of women and men police officers deployed in our peace operations, who work relentlessly to serve communities in increasingly challenging contexts. And I would like to honour the memory of the five police officers who lost their lives in the line of duty over the past year. Their courage and sacrifice will not be forgotten.
As noted in the report of the Secretary-General on the overall performance of peacekeeping operations (S/2023/646), the gap between peacekeeping mandates and what the missions can, in practice, actually deliver has become quite significant, particularly in some of the mission settings. We are doing, and will continue to do, our utmost to strengthen the effectiveness of United Nations peacekeeping through the Action for Peacekeeping (A4P) initiative, and particularly the areas that we have prioritized within Action for Peace Plus (A4P+) initiative. We have made significant strides in advancing our commitments under the A4P initiative and in fulfilling the priorities of the A4P+ initiative. Rigorous and transparent monitoring of the performance and impact of peacekeeping operations provides the foundation for improving our operations. We recently released the third A4P+ progress report, which, in turn, ensures that we remain on track in the fulfilment of our commitments. The forthcoming report will be provided to the Council in the coming month.
However, there is only so much that United Nations peacekeeping operations can achieve alone. Violent conflict is increasing in many parts of the world, and the number, intensity and length of conflicts worldwide are at their highest level since before the end of the Cold War. This is all taking place amid heightened geopolitical tensions, including divisions within the Council. In that context, United Nations peacekeeping operations can only achieve in many cases what I call the intermediate goals of peacekeeping, which include preserving ceasefires, protecting hundreds of thousands of civilians, mediating local conflicts and strengthening institutions whenever possible. Those are very important goals, of course, but the ultimate objective of United Nations peacekeeping is to achieve durable political solutions to conflict. Without the unified political support of Member States — and particularly the Security Council — for political solutions where our missions are deployed, we can serve only to mitigate rather than resolve conflicts. We will nonetheless continue to do our utmost to support political solutions despite being hamstrung.
We must also manage our expectations and recognize that those intermediate goals of peacekeeping are important ends in and of themselves. The United Nations police play a notable role in achieving many of the goals.
The first priority of A4P+, which is ensuring coherence behind political strategies, acknowledges that entities across the United Nations system bring to bear varied resources and leverage that can support and influence a country’s political trajectory. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the United Nations police has been involved in various national and local-level engagements, as part of a political strategy, in cooperation with regional and subregional partners, and transition planning. The United Nations police is supporting national electoral processes by training the Congolese National Police on public order management to help ensure the security of elections and, more generally, further build its capacity.
The second A4P+ priority focuses on strengthening synergies through greater strategic and operational integration across mission components. The United Nations Police Division continues its efforts to utilize the Comprehensive Planning and Performance Assessment System, including the development of police-related impact indicators to improve accountability for performance.
The next priority of A4P+, which is ensuring the highest levels of accountability to peacekeepers, is critical in improving the safety and security of our personnel. In support of the implementation of the Action Plan to Improve the Security of United Nations Peacekeepers, the United Nations police has conducted in-mission performance assessment and evaluation team visits to the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic, the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali, the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the United Nations Mission in South Sudan this year, and we are working with police-contributing countries to address any shortfalls, in particular those related to contingent-owned equipment or command and control. The peacekeeping ministerial meeting in Accra, Ghana, next month will be an important opportunity to help to ensure United Nations peacekeepers are well trained and well equipped.
The United Nations police continues its efforts to create an enabling environment and foster a gender-responsive working environment and accommodation. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, multiple projects have been implemented for the benefit of women military and police peacekeepers, including an increase in the ratio of shared ablutions, the refurbishment of living accommodations and the construction of dedicated recreational areas. The United Nations police also continues to enforce zero tolerance for sexual exploitation and abuse through enhanced predeployment and in-mission training.
Regarding strategic communications, which is the sixth priority of A4P+, the United Nations police contributes to the efforts by the Department of Peace Operations to proactively counter misinformation, disinformation and hate speech. That includes more recently a French-language training course on countering hate speech and disinformation during the electoral cycle, which was developed by the Standing Police Capacity and conducted recently in the Central African Republic.
The women and peace and security agenda is infused in all aspects of A4P+. To enhance the protection of women and girls in vulnerable situations, the United Nations police remains focused on strengthening engagement with civil society and women’s rights organizations. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, long-standing community-based partnerships with disabilities-focused organizations have improved the effectiveness of police services and outreach to disabled women and girls in communities. In South Sudan, to address protection risks for women, UNPOL has conducted several gender-responsive patrols informed by an analysis of threat levels to women, based on the information collected from the community and intelligence sources.
Furthermore, with the support of Member States, the United Nations police has already achieved its gender parity targets for 2025 in most categories of personnel, with women currently comprising one in five United Nations police officers, including 30 per cent of individual police officers and 16 per cent of members of formed police units.
A4P+ is part of a renewed collective engagement to strengthen peacekeeping as an invaluable instrument for peace and security and an expression of international solidarity. Through it, we are better though not sufficiently placed to address today’s challenges to peace and security and, ultimately, to improve the lives of the people we serve.
This annual briefing to the Council is an opportunity to reaffirm the vital role that the United Nations police plays across the conflict-prevention spectrum, from peacekeeping to peacebuilding. It provides a forum to discuss some of the key priorities for United Nations policing, through which we aim to support the Member States in fostering representative, responsive and accountable police services that serve and protect people.
We are very grateful for Council members’ continued and strong support for A4P commitments and A4P+ priorities and for their generous contributions of highly qualified police personnel to serve with the United Nations police.