Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,
It is a great pleasure to join you virtually for this important conference. China’s Ministry of Public Security has been a long-time partner of United Nations’ peacekeeping, providing us with high-quality personnel, training, and other support to enable us to fulfill our mandates and improve the lives of the people we serve across the conflict prevention spectrum, from peacekeeping to peace building.
Many of the issues you will discuss throughout this conference have particular resonance for UN’s peacekeeping, especially ahead of the Summit of the Future being convened by our Secretary-General in just a few weeks. The challenges we face today are greater than ever. The nature of conflicts is more complex and multidimensional. Our peacekeepers are seeing threats on many fronts, from armed groups, transnational organized criminals, terrorist, and cyber criminals, all with a stake in preventing peace. Our peace operations are also confronting growing challenges from hate speech, misinformation, and disinformation, which are increasingly weapons of war. Artificial intelligence is a new frontier that offers great promise, but also potentially great peril for our personnel, partners, and communities.
Appreciating the inter-connectiveness of these challenges, the UN Secretary-General unveiled the “Action for Peacekeeping” initiative, or A4P in 2018. Three years later, the implementation strategy known as A4P+ was launched. A4P+ comprises of seven priorities that the UN and our member states see as critical to strengthening our collective impact and meeting the challenges of today and tomorrow, as well as two cross-cutting themes that infuse all our work.
Among the A4P+ priorities, we continue to work to advance political solutions, particularly locally-led conflict resolution, which lays the foundation for building a lasting peace. For example, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the UN police have supported national electoral processes by training the Congolese National Police on information collection and public order management, in cooperation with regional and sub-regional partners.
Improving the safety and security of peacekeepers and thereby performance and accountability is another top A4P+ priority. We owe this to our member states who provide their personnel to the UN. In support of the implementation of the Action Plan to Improve the Security of UN Peacekeepers, the UN police conduct annual in-mission performance assessments and evaluation team visits to our high-risk missions in the Central African Republic, the DRC, and South Sudan. We continue collaborating with our contributing countries to address shortfalls, particularly related to contingent-owned equipment and command and control. I must take this opportunity to commend China for its extremely generous contribution towards establishing the United Nations Peace and Development Trust Fund and tis Peace and Security Sub-Fund. Grants through the Sub-Fund have made the work the UN police in this area possible.
Strategic communication remains fundamental to building the trust and support needed for missions to carry out their mandates. We must therefore, effectively manage expectations by strengthening understanding of our roles and responsibilities and demonstrating the tangible impact of our work. The UN police support these efforts through capacity-building, including a French training course on addressing hate speech and misinformation that was developed by the Standing Police Capacity and conducted in the Central African Republic. Finally, in line with the Women, Peace and Security agenda, the UN police continue to foster a safe, enabling, and respectful working environment and accommodations. While much progress has been made towards achieving our gender parity goals, particularly among the UN police, which has already reached its targets for 2025 in three out of four categories of women personnel, more can and must be done. For this, we will need you to continue contributing your women police officers for UN services. As I have said before, more women in peacekeeping means more effective peacekeeping.
Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,
As part of the Secretary-General’s New Agenda for Peace, we continue to move towards a more networked multilateralism. Addressing the many challenges of today is not something the UN, a single country, or a single peacekeeping operation can do alone. Peacekeeping is a partnership, and participation in this conference of so many of our member states, including many of our top police and military contributors, give me hope that we can achieve the objectives that connect us all by working together.
During the last United Nations Chiefs of Police Summit in June, which many of you attended, China announced two key pledges: to fund a project to support major and emerging police contributing countries and to help train 100 peacekeeping police personnel. There are many ways in which each of you can support us, including through your political commitment to advance policy in priorities, both in your capitals and in multilateral forums; your financial support to address contingencies and specializing and emerging requirements not covered to regular budgeting; and most importantly, your police personnel, without whom untold people around the world would suffer.
Enclosing, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for the positive and lasting legacy of UN’s peacekeeping to to which you have contributed through your personnel, equipment, financial contributions, and advocacy. We thank you for your support and hope we can continue to count on you.
Jean-Pierre Lacroix Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations
