Abstract
The appointment of a new United Nations Secretary-General brings new opportunities to address issues that have beset the Organisation over recent decades. A priority in that regard should be accountability for harms caused within peacekeeping. This issue has received significant attention over recent years, with the close scrutiny of cholera in Haiti and lead poisoning in Kosovo being just two examples. While legal scholarship in recent years has focused on how to reform UN accountability, particularly in relation to the Haiti Cholera Claims, there have been fewer proposals on how to address crimes committed by UN peacekeepers. One of the most serious of those crimes, in terms of harms caused both to victims and to legitimacy of UN peacekeeping operations, is sexual abuse. Yet the proposals for addressing that issue largely have not been successful. To that end, this article – which is exploratory in nature – sets out why there is a need for a wholescale reform of how we approach accountability for peacekeepers who perpetrate sexual abuse, explaining particularly how the problems relate to laws and normative frameworks, and to investigations and prosecutions. The article then proposes elements that might be considered in a new victim-centred approach, namely criminal justice; truth and reconciliation; human rights; and political processes.
Highlights
The need for stronger and more transparent accountability structures for international organizations and their personnel is a subject that has been explored extensively.EJIL (2018), Vol 29 No 3, 961–985 doi:10.1093/ejil/chy039962 EJIL 29 (2018), 961–985Many legal commentators have focused on the gaps created when international organizations fulfil functions previously undertaken by states yet do so without considering accountability structures to address harms caused during those activities
This article – which is exploratory in nature – sets out why there is a need for a wholesale reform of how we approach accountability for peacekeepers who perpetrate sexual abuse, explaining how the problems relate to laws and normative frameworks as well as to investigations and prosecutions
These courts and tribunals were created alongside the International Criminal Court (ICC), which was established by the 1998 Rome Statute.[58]
Summary
The need for stronger and more transparent accountability structures for international organizations and their personnel is a subject that has been explored extensively. These range from some countries having inadequate national laws on sexual abuse, to cultural and political resistance, and to failures by the UN to monitor and follow up on the implementation of the legal obligations of troop-contributing countries (TCCs) Such issues could be addressed through UN policies and political pressures ( such steps frequently do not go far enough to achieve those aims), but might better benefit from accountability mechanisms that function in the same way for civilians as for soldiers. The UN focuses on three broad categories when seeking to address sexual abuse by peacekeepers: prevention, enforcement and remedial action, all of which centre on the perpetrators Within these categories, there are many aspects identified by scholars, practitioners and experts, ranging from pre-deployment training, to raising awareness about gender and cultures, to the empowerment of local populations, to foregrounding human rights and, crucially, to accountability laws and mechanisms alongside justice and support for victims. We explore the need to implement human rights alongside criminal law and political processes in order to achieve justice and accountability, before concluding in the fifth section
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