Ministry Statements & Speeches:
Thank you Madam President.
New Zealand also thanks Nigeria for convening this meeting and the Secretary General for his briefing and for staying with us this morning.
We are strong advocates of the role of regional organisations and of the need for cooperation between the United Nations, especially the Security Council and Regional Organisations.
African leadership on this issue is important, but we must also acknowledge at the outset that these are not challenges solely limited to Africa, and that the issues discussed today affect other regional organisations around the globe.
Experience in our own region has been that regional organisations can be highly effective: They frequently do have the comparative advantage, as the Secretary General has referred to, because of their immediate interests in local stability, their understanding of the local context and, where necessary, logistical ease of deployment.
As the Secretary General has noted this morning, the High Level Panel on Peace Operations has strongly endorsed the role of regional organisations and made encouraging recommendations for better synergy with the United Nations and especially with the Security Council. We have seen many successful examples of regional organisations responding to emerging crises to prevent the emergence of conflict.
However, we need to be honest. In addition to the issues of finance and capacity, which have already been highlighted today, there are other significant challenges to effective cooperation with regional and sub-regional engagement on peace and security issues. And the result is that there are still too many situations where regional action is not proving sufficient to prevent or resolve crises.
Cooperation with the Security Council, particularly in the case of key organisations such as the African Union, is still largely reactive and ad hoc. Interventions such as AFISMA in Mali were highly challenging, not only in terms of resourcing but also vision and shared understanding. This hugely complicated the process of transition to a post AFISMA operation.
A key part of the problem, as we see it, is a failure of approach on both sides. There is just not enough political energy going into cooperation to produce the necessary collective partnership between the two Councils. Such structured cooperation between the Security Council and regional entities on developing coordinated approaches should begin at the outset when crises are emerging. This Council and the AU’s Peace and Security Council need to do a better job of working in unison to complement each other and of utilising each other’s comparative advantages, starting with conflict prevention.
We also consider that both organs need to be less concerned about sequencing and should focus more on working together and simultaneously. Again, the High Level Panel has useful recommendations in this regard. At the end of the day, both the UN and the AU have responsibilities to fulfil. They cannot avoid those by arguing that they’re waiting for the other to act.
If cooperation is to work long term, it needs a more systematised arrangement based on the view that these two organisations recognise the threats in the region and wish to work with each other to address them. There is a clear capacity gap not only in terms of the organisations themselves, but also in terms of national capacity that Security Council members themselves deploy, to promote effective cooperation. As a result, we are still some distance from the kind of coordinated approach to the assessment of key regional threats and the development of appropriate and coordinated responses that we all seek.
Furthermore, we cannot simply wish away the uncomfortable financial realities. Capacity is still a major issue for the AU and the PSC. The shift towards a greater role for regional actors over the past decade has put real pressure on regional and sub-regional organisations to build complex apparatus over a short space of time. There needs to be a sustained long term focus on building effective regional conflict management frameworks so that regional organisations are fully equipped to take on the tasks on behalf of the international community.
In our view the UN has a clear role to play in providing assistance. Indeed it is in the UN’s own interest to assist. Because as the experiences in Mali and the Central African Republic have clearly shown, the only alternative is the UN itself taking on more and more highly dangerous and expensive operations and paying the full cost. Those whose positions are driven by fiscal considerations should think about how much they would have saved if those operations had been funded under some kind of innovative formula that would have resulted in only part of the cost being funded from the UN budget.
We suggest that the Security Council continues to have a very important role to play:
- The Council should continue to provide institutional support to regional organisations through dedicated UN resources such as UNOWA and UNOAU. These are useful for building strong collaborative relationships with ECOWAS and the African Union and have led to effective results on the ground.
- The Council should also look to identify effective and practical ways to improve interaction between the members of the Council and the AU’s Peace and Security Council.
- And the Security Council must also face up to the challenges of how regional and sub-regional peacekeeping operations are funded, including by improving the efficiency of the existing mechanisms. The recommendations of the High Level Panel Review for predictable financing for AU-led peace support operations under Security Council mandates are a useful starting point for discussion, as the Secretary General has told us this morning.
For our part, New Zealand supported the inaugural E10/PSC meeting in Addis Ababa at the start of this year and, with Spain, we have met at the start of each month with the Chair of the AU Peace and Security Council to discuss the joint agendas of each Council. We have also sought the views of key regional actors ahead of and following key UNSC decisions. In our view this communication between the Councils in New York and in Addis Ababa needs to be informal, regular and substantive, if it is to be effective.
Most of all, it has to become part of the regular business of both organisations. That will mean we have the partnership that the Secretary General rightly has identified must be our objective.
Thank you.