brahimi report (2000)

74
United Nations A/55/305–S/2000/809 General Assembly Security Council Distr.: General 21 August 2000 Original: English 00-59470 (E) 180800 ````````` General Assembly Security Council Fifty-fifth session Fifty-fifth year Item 87 of the provisional agenda* Comprehensive review of the whole question of peacekeeping operations in all their aspects Identical letters dated 21 August 2000 from the Secretary-General to the President of the General Assembly and the President of the Security Council On 7 March 2000, I convened a high-level Panel to undertake a thorough review of the United Nations peace and security activities, and to present a clear set of specific, concrete and practical recommendations to assist the United Nations in conducting such activities better in the future. I asked Mr. Lakhdar Brahimi, the former Foreign Minister of Algeria, to chair the Panel, which included the following eminent personalities from around the world, with a wide range of experience in the fields of peacekeeping, peace-building, development and humanitarian assistance: Mr. J. Brian Atwood, Ambassador Colin Granderson, Dame Ann Hercus, Mr. Richard Monk, General Klaus Naumann (retd.), Ms. Hisako Shimura, Ambassador Vladimir Shustov, General Philip Sibanda and Dr. Cornelio Sommaruga. I would be grateful if the Panel’s report, which has been transmitted to me in the enclosed letter dated 17 August 2000 from the Chairman of the Panel, could be brought to the attention of Member States. The Panel’s analysis is frank yet fair; its recommendations are far-reaching yet sensible and practical. The expeditious implementation of the Panel’s recommendations, in my view, is essential to make the United Nations truly credible as a force for peace. Many of the Panel’s recommendations relate to matters fully within the purview of the Secretary-General, while others will need the approval and support of the legislative bodies of the United Nations. I urge all Member States to join me in considering, approving and supporting the implementation of those recommendations. In this connection, I am pleased to inform you that I have designated the Deputy Secretary-General to follow up on the report’s recommendations and to oversee the preparation of a detailed implementation plan, which I shall submit to the General Assembly and the Security Council. * A/55/150.

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Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations (“Brahimi report”) [A/55/305]. http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/resources/reports.shtml

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Page 1: Brahimi Report (2000)

United Nations A/55/305–S/2000/809

General AssemblySecurity Council

Distr.: General21 August 2000

Original: English

00-59470 (E) 180800`````````

General Assembly Security CouncilFifty-fifth session Fifty-fifth yearItem 87 of the provisional agenda*Comprehensive review of the whole question ofpeacekeeping operations in all their aspects

Identical letters dated 21 August 2000 from the Secretary-Generalto the President of the General Assembly and the President of theSecurity Council

On 7 March 2000, I convened a high-level Panel to undertake a thoroughreview of the United Nations peace and security activities, and to present a clear setof specific, concrete and practical recommendations to assist the United Nations inconducting such activities better in the future. I asked Mr. Lakhdar Brahimi, theformer Foreign Minister of Algeria, to chair the Panel, which included the followingeminent personalities from around the world, with a wide range of experience in thefields of peacekeeping, peace-building, development and humanitarian assistance:Mr. J. Brian Atwood, Ambassador Colin Granderson, Dame Ann Hercus,Mr. Richard Monk, General Klaus Naumann (retd.), Ms. Hisako Shimura,Ambassador Vladimir Shustov, General Philip Sibanda and Dr. CornelioSommaruga.

I would be grateful if the Panel’s report, which has been transmitted to me inthe enclosed letter dated 17 August 2000 from the Chairman of the Panel, could bebrought to the attention of Member States. The Panel’s analysis is frank yet fair; itsrecommendations are far-reaching yet sensible and practical. The expeditiousimplementation of the Panel’s recommendations, in my view, is essential to makethe United Nations truly credible as a force for peace.

Many of the Panel’s recommendations relate to matters fully within thepurview of the Secretary-General, while others will need the approval and support ofthe legislative bodies of the United Nations. I urge all Member States to join me inconsidering, approving and supporting the implementation of thoserecommendations. In this connection, I am pleased to inform you that I havedesignated the Deputy Secretary-General to follow up on the report’srecommendations and to oversee the preparation of a detailed implementation plan,which I shall submit to the General Assembly and the Security Council.

* A/55/150.

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I very much hope that the report of the Panel, in particular its ExecutiveSummary, will be brought to the attention of all the leaders who will be coming toNew York in September 2000 to participate in the Millennium Summit. That high-level and historic meeting presents a unique opportunity for us to commence theprocess of renewing the United Nations capacity to secure and build peace. I ask forthe support of the General Assembly and Security Council in converting into realitythe far-reaching agenda laid out in the report.

(Signed) Kofi A. Annan

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Letter dated 17 August 2000 from the Chairman of the Panel on United NationsPeace Operations to the Secretary-General

The Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, which you convened in March2000, was privileged to have been asked by you to assess the United Nations abilityto conduct peace operations effectively, and to offer frank, specific and realisticrecommendations for ways in which to enhance that capacity.

Mr. Brian Atwood, Ambassador Colin Granderson, Dame Ann Hercus, Mr.Richard Monk, General (ret.) Klaus Naumann, Ms. Hisako Shimura, AmbassadorVladimir Shustov, General Philip Sibanda, Dr. Cornelio Sommaruga and I acceptedthis challenge out of deep respect for you and because each of us believes ferventlythat the United Nations system can do better in the cause of peace. We admiredgreatly your willingness to undertake past highly critical analyses of United Nationsoperations in Rwanda and Srebrenica. This degree of self-criticism is rare for anylarge organization and particularly rare for the United Nations.

We also would like to pay tribute to Deputy Secretary-General LouiseFréchette and Chef de Cabinet S. Iqbal Riza, who remained with us throughout ourmeetings and who answered our many questions with unfailing patience and clarity.They have given us much of their time and we benefited immensely from theirintimate knowledge of the United Nations present limitations and futurerequirements.

Producing a review and recommendations for reform of a system with thescope and complexity of United Nations peace operations, in only four months, wasa daunting task. It would have been impossible but for the dedication and hard workof Dr. William Durch (with support from staff at the Stimson Center), Mr. SalmanAhmed of the United Nations and the willingness of United Nations officialsthroughout the system, including serving heads of mission, to share their insightsboth in interviews and in often comprehensive critiques of their own organizationsand experiences. Former heads of peace operations and force commanders,academics and representatives of non-governmental organizations were equallyhelpful.

The Panel engaged in intense discussion and debate. Long hours were devotedto reviewing recommendations and supporting analysis that we knew would besubject to scrutiny and interpretation. Over three separate three-day meetings inNew York, Geneva and then New York again, we forged the letter and the spirit ofthe attached report. Its analysis and recommendations reflect our consensus, whichwe convey to you with our hope that it serve the cause of systematic reform andrenewal of this core function of the United Nations.

As we say in the report, we are aware that you are engaged in conducting acomprehensive reform of the Secretariat. We thus hope that our recommendations fitwithin that wider process, with slight adjustments if necessary. We realize that notall of our recommendations can be implemented overnight, but many of them dorequire urgent action and the unequivocal support of Member States.

Throughout these months, we have read and heard encouraging words fromMember States, large and small, from the South and from the North, stressing thenecessity for urgent improvement in the ways the United Nations addresses conflict

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situations. We urge them to act decisively to translate into reality those of ourrecommendations that require formal action by them.

The Panel has full confidence that the official we suggest you designate tooversee the implementation of our recommendations, both inside the Secretariat andwith Member States, will have your full support, in line with your conviction totransform the United Nations into the type of twenty-first century institution it needsto be to effectively meet the current and future threats to world peace.

Finally, if I may be allowed to add a personal note, I wish to express mydeepest gratitude to each of my colleagues on this Panel. Together, they havecontributed to the project an impressive sum of knowledge and experience. Theyhave consistently shown the highest degree of commitment to the Organization anda deep understanding of its needs. During our meetings and our contacts from afar,they have all been extremely kind to me, invariably helpful, patient and generous,thus making the otherwise intimidating task as their Chairman relatively easier andtruly enjoyable.

(Signed) Lakhdar BrahimiChairman of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations

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Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations

ContentsParagraphs Page

Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii

I. The need for change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1–8 1

II. Doctrine, strategy and decision-making for peace operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9–83 2

A. Defining the elements of peace operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10–14 2

B. Experience of the past. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15–28 3

C. Implications for preventive action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29–34 5

Summary of key recommendations on preventive action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 6

D. Implications for peace-building strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35–47 6

Summary of key recommendations on peace-building . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 8

E. Implications for peacekeeping doctrine and strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48–55 9

Summary of key recommendation on peacekeeping doctrine and strategy . . . . 55 10

F. Clear, credible and achievable mandates. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56–64 10

Summary of key recommendations on clear, credible and achievablemandates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 11

G. Information-gathering, analysis and strategic planning capacities . . . . . . . . . . 65–75 12

Summary of key recommendation on information and strategic analysis . . . . . 75 13

H. The challenge of transitional civil administration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76–83 13

Summary of key recommendation on transitional civil administration. . . . . . . 83 14

III. United Nations capacities to deploy operations rapidly and effectively . . . . . . . . . . 84–169 14

A. Defining what “rapid and effective deployment” entails . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86–91 15

Summary of key recommendation on determining deployment timelines . . . . . 91 16

B. Effective mission leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92–101 16

Summary of key recommendations on mission leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 17

C. Military personnel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102–117 17

Summary of key recommendations on military personnel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 20

D. Civilian police . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118–126 20

Summary of key recommendations on civilian police personnel . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 21

E. Civilian specialists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127–145 21

1. Lack of standby systems to respond to unexpected or high-volumesurge demands. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128–132 22

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2. Difficulties in attracting and retaining the best external recruits . . . . . . . 133–135 23

3. Shortages in administrative and support functions at the mid-to-seniorlevels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 23

4. Penalizing field deployment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137–138 23

5. Obsolescence in the Field Service category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139–140 24

6. Lack of a comprehensive staffing strategy for peace operations. . . . . . . . 141–145 24

Summary of key recommendations on civilian specialists . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 25

F. Public information capacity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146–150 25

Summary of key recommendation on rapidly deployable capacity for publicinformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 26

G. Logistics support, the procurement process and expenditure management . . . 151–169 26

Summary of key recommendations on logistics support and expendituremanagement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 28

IV. Headquarters resources and structure for planning and supporting peacekeepingoperations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170–245 29

A. Staffing-levels and funding for Headquarters support for peacekeepingoperations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172–197 29

Summary of key recommendations on funding Headquarters support forpeacekeeping operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 34

B. Need and proposal for the establishment of Integrated Mission Task Forces . 198–217 34

Summary of key recommendation on integrated mission planning andsupport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 37

C. Other structural adjustments required in the Department of PeacekeepingOperations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218–233 37

1. Military and Civilian Police Division . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219–225 37

2. Field Administration and Logistics Division . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226–228 38

3. Lessons Learned Unit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229–230 39

4. Senior management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231–233 39

Summary of key recommendations on other structural adjustments inthe Department of Peacekeeping Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 39

D. Structural adjustments needed outside the Department of PeacekeepingOperations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234–245 40

1. Operational support for public information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235–238 40

Summary of key recommendation on structural adjustments in publicinformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 40

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2. Peace-building support in the Department of Political Affairs . . . . . . . . . 239–243 40

Summary of key recommendations for peace-building support in theDepartment of Political Affairs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 41

3. Peace operations support in the Office of the United Nations HighCommissioner for Human Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244–245 41

Summary of key recommendation on strengthening the Office of theUnited Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 41

V. Peace operations and the information age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246–264 42

A. Information technology in peace operations: strategy and policy issues . . . . . 247–251 42

Summary of key recommendation on information technology strategy andpolicy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 42

B. Tools for knowledge management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252–258 43

Summary of key recommendations on information technology tools in peaceoperations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258 43

C. Improving the timeliness of Internet-based public information . . . . . . . . . . . . 259–264 44

Summary of key recommendation on the timeliness of Internet-based publicinformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263 44

VI. Challenges to implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265–280 44

Annexes

I. Members of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

II. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

III. Summary of recommendations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

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Executive SummaryThe United Nations was founded, in the words of its Charter, in order “to save

succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Meeting this challenge is the mostimportant function of the Organization, and to a very significant degree it is theyardstick with which the Organization is judged by the peoples it exists to serve.Over the last decade, the United Nations has repeatedly failed to meet the challenge,and it can do no better today. Without renewed commitment on the part of MemberStates, significant institutional change and increased financial support, the UnitedNations will not be capable of executing the critical peacekeeping and peace-building tasks that the Member States assign to it in coming months and years.There are many tasks which United Nations peacekeeping forces should not beasked to undertake and many places they should not go. But when the UnitedNations does send its forces to uphold the peace, they must be prepared to confrontthe lingering forces of war and violence, with the ability and determination to defeatthem.

The Secretary-General has asked the Panel on United Nations PeaceOperations, composed of individuals experienced in various aspects of conflictprevention, peacekeeping and peace-building, to assess the shortcomings of theexisting system and to make frank, specific and realistic recommendations forchange. Our recommendations focus not only on politics and strategy but also andperhaps even more so on operational and organizational areas of need.

For preventive initiatives to succeed in reducing tension and averting conflict,the Secretary-General needs clear, strong and sustained political support fromMember States. Furthermore, as the United Nations has bitterly and repeatedlydiscovered over the last decade, no amount of good intentions can substitute for thefundamental ability to project credible force if complex peacekeeping, in particular,is to succeed. But force alone cannot create peace; it can only create the space inwhich peace may be built. Moreover, the changes that the Panel recommends willhave no lasting impact unless Member States summon the political will to supportthe United Nations politically, financially and operationally to enable the UnitedNations to be truly credible as a force for peace.

Each of the recommendations contained in the present report is designed toremedy a serious problem in strategic direction, decision-making, rapid deployment,operational planning and support, and the use of modern information technology.Key assessments and recommendations are highlighted below, largely in the order inwhich they appear in the body of the text (the numbers of the relevant paragraphs inthe main text are provided in parentheses). In addition, a summary ofrecommendations is contained in annex III.

Experience of the past (paras. 15-28)

It should have come as no surprise to anyone that some of the missions of thepast decade would be particularly hard to accomplish: they tended to deploy whereconflict had not resulted in victory for any side, where a military stalemate orinternational pressure or both had brought fighting to a halt but at least some of theparties to the conflict were not seriously committed to ending the confrontation. UnitedNations operations thus did not deploy into post-conflict situations but tried to createthem. In such complex operations, peacekeepers work to maintain a secure localenvironment while peacebuilders work to make that environment self-sustaining.

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Only such an environment offers a ready exit to peacekeeping forces, makingpeacekeepers and peacebuilders inseparable partners.

Implications for preventive action and peace-building: the need for strategy andsupport (paras. 29-47)

The United Nations and its members face a pressing need to establish moreeffective strategies for conflict prevention, in both the long and short terms. In thiscontext, the Panel endorses the recommendations of the Secretary-General withrespect to conflict prevention contained in the Millennium Report (A/54/2000) andin his remarks before the Security Council’s second open meeting on conflictprevention in July 2000. It also encourages the Secretary-General’s more frequentuse of fact-finding missions to areas of tension in support of short-term crisis-preventive action.

Furthermore, the Security Council and the General Assembly’s SpecialCommittee on Peacekeeping Operations, conscious that the United Nations willcontinue to face the prospect of having to assist communities and nations in makingthe transition from war to peace, have each recognized and acknowledged the keyrole of peace-building in complex peace operations. This will require that the UnitedNations system address what has hitherto been a fundamental deficiency in the wayit has conceived of, funded and implemented peace-building strategies andactivities. Thus, the Panel recommends that the Executive Committee on Peace andSecurity (ECPS) present to the Secretary-General a plan to strengthen the permanentcapacity of the United Nations to develop peace-building strategies and toimplement programmes in support of those strategies.

Among the changes that the Panel supports are: a doctrinal shift in the use ofcivilian police and related rule of law elements in peace operations that emphasizesa team approach to upholding the rule of law and respect for human rights andhelping communities coming out of a conflict to achieve national reconciliation;consolidation of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programmes intothe assessed budgets of complex peace operations in their first phase; flexibility forheads of United Nations peace operations to fund “quick impact projects” that makea real difference in the lives of people in the mission area; and better integration ofelectoral assistance into a broader strategy for the support of governanceinstitutions.

Implications for peacekeeping: the need for robust doctrine and realisticmandates (paras. 48-64)

The Panel concurs that consent of the local parties, impartiality and the use offorce only in self-defence should remain the bedrock principles of peacekeeping.Experience shows, however, that in the context of intra-State/transnational conflicts,consent may be manipulated in many ways. Impartiality for United Nationsoperations must therefore mean adherence to the principles of the Charter: whereone party to a peace agreement clearly and incontrovertibly is violating its terms,continued equal treatment of all parties by the United Nations can in the bestcase result in ineffectiveness and in the worst may amount to complicity with evil.No failure did more to damage the standing and credibility of United Nationspeacekeeping in the 1990s than its reluctance to distinguish victim from aggressor.

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In the past, the United Nations has often found itself unable to respondeffectively to such challenges. It is a fundamental premise of the present report,however, that it must be able to do so. Once deployed, United Nations peacekeepersmust be able to carry out their mandate professionally and successfully. This meansthat United Nations military units must be capable of defending themselves, othermission components and the mission’s mandate. Rules of engagement should besufficiently robust and not force United Nations contingents to cede the initiative totheir attackers.

This means, in turn, that the Secretariat must not apply best-case planningassumptions to situations where the local actors have historically exhibited worst-case behaviour. It means that mandates should specify an operation’s authority touse force. It means bigger forces, better equipped and more costly but able to be acredible deterrent. In particular, United Nations forces for complex operationsshould be afforded the field intelligence and other capabilities needed to mount aneffective defence against violent challengers.

Moreover, United Nations peacekeepers — troops or police — who witnessviolence against civilians should be presumed to be authorized to stop it, withintheir means, in support of basic United Nations principles. However, operationsgiven a broad and explicit mandate for civilian protection must be given the specificresources needed to carry out that mandate.

The Secretariat must tell the Security Council what it needs to know, not whatit wants to hear, when recommending force and other resource levels for a newmission, and it must set those levels according to realistic scenarios that take intoaccount likely challenges to implementation. Security Council mandates, in turn,should reflect the clarity that peacekeeping operations require for unity of effortwhen they deploy into potentially dangerous situations.

The current practice is for the Secretary-General to be given a SecurityCouncil resolution specifying troop levels on paper, not knowing whether he will begiven the troops and other personnel that the mission needs to function effectively,or whether they will be properly equipped. The Panel is of the view that, oncerealistic mission requirements have been set and agreed to, the Council should leaveits authorizing resolution in draft form until the Secretary-General confirms that hehas received troop and other commitments from Member States sufficient to meetthose requirements.

Member States that do commit formed military units to an operation should beinvited to consult with the members of the Security Council during mandateformulation; such advice might usefully be institutionalized via the establishment ofad hoc subsidiary organs of the Council, as provided for in Article 29 of the Charter.Troop contributors should also be invited to attend Secretariat briefings of theSecurity Council pertaining to crises that affect the safety and security of missionpersonnel or to a change or reinterpretation of the mandate regarding the use offorce.

New headquarters capacity for information management and strategic analysis(paras. 65-75)

The Panel recommends that a new information-gathering and analysis entity becreated to support the informational and analytical needs of the Secretary-General

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and the members of the Executive Committee on Peace and Security (ECPS).Without such capacity, the Secretariat will remain a reactive institution, unable toget ahead of daily events, and the ECPS will not be able to fulfil the role for whichit was created.

The Panel’s proposed ECPS Information and Strategic Analysis Secretariat(EISAS) would create and maintain integrated databases on peace and securityissues, distribute that knowledge efficiently within the United Nations system,generate policy analyses, formulate long-term strategies for ECPS and bringbudding crises to the attention of the ECPS leadership. It could also propose andmanage the agenda of ECPS itself, helping to transform it into the decision-makingbody anticipated in the Secretary-General’s initial reforms.

The Panel proposes that EISAS be created by consolidating the existingSituation Centre of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) with anumber of small, scattered policy planning offices, and adding a small team ofmilitary analysts, experts in international criminal networks and information systemsspecialists. EISAS should serve the needs of all members of ECPS.

Improved mission guidance and leadership (paras. 92-101)

The Panel believes it is essential to assemble the leadership of a new missionas early as possible at United Nations Headquarters, to participate in shaping amission’s concept of operations, support plan, budget, staffing and Headquartersmission guidance. To that end, the Panel recommends that the Secretary-Generalcompile, in a systematic fashion and with input from Member States, acomprehensive list of potential special representatives of the Secretary-General(SRSGs), force commanders, civilian police commissioners, their potential deputiesand potential heads of other components of a mission, representing a broadgeographic and equitable gender distribution.

Rapid deployment standards and “on-call” expertise (paras. 86-91 and 102-169)

The first 6 to 12 weeks following a ceasefire or peace accord are often themost critical ones for establishing both a stable peace and the credibility of a newoperation. Opportunities lost during that period are hard to regain.

The Panel recommends that the United Nations define “rapid and effectivedeployment capacity” as the ability to fully deploy traditional peacekeepingoperations within 30 days of the adoption of a Security Council resolutionestablishing such an operation, and within 90 days in the case of complexpeacekeeping operations.

The Panel recommends that the United Nations standby arrangements system(UNSAS) be developed further to include several coherent, multinational, brigade-size forces and the necessary enabling forces, created by Member States working inpartnership, in order to better meet the need for the robust peacekeeping forces thatthe Panel has advocated. The Panel also recommends that the Secretariat send ateam to confirm the readiness of each potential troop contributor to meet therequisite United Nations training and equipment requirements for peacekeepingoperations, prior to deployment. Units that do not meet the requirements must not bedeployed.

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To support such rapid and effective deployment, the Panel recommends that arevolving “on-call list” of about 100 experienced, well qualified military officers,carefully vetted and accepted by DPKO, be created within UNSAS. Teams drawnfrom this list and available for duty on seven days’ notice would translate broad,strategic-level mission concepts developed at Headquarters into concrete operationaland tactical plans in advance of the deployment of troop contingents, and wouldaugment a core element from DPKO to serve as part of a mission start-up team.

Parallel on-call lists of civilian police, international judicial experts, penalexperts and human rights specialists must be available in sufficient numbers tostrengthen rule of law institutions, as needed, and should also be part of UNSAS.Pre-trained teams could then be drawn from this list to precede the main body ofcivilian police and related specialists into a new mission area, facilitating the rapidand effective deployment of the law and order component into the mission.

The Panel also calls upon Member States to establish enhanced national“pools” of police officers and related experts, earmarked for deployment to UnitedNations peace operations, to help meet the high demand for civilian police andrelated criminal justice/rule of law expertise in peace operations dealing with intra-State conflict. The Panel also urges Member States to consider forming jointregional partnerships and programmes for the purpose of training members of therespective national pools to United Nations civilian police doctrine and standards.

The Secretariat should also address, on an urgent basis, the needs: to put inplace a transparent and decentralized recruitment mechanism for civilian fieldpersonnel; to improve the retention of the civilian specialists that are needed inevery complex peace operation; and to create standby arrangements for their rapiddeployment.

Finally, the Panel recommends that the Secretariat radically alter the systemsand procedures in place for peacekeeping procurement in order to facilitate rapiddeployment. It recommends that responsibilities for peacekeeping budgeting andprocurement be moved out of the Department of Management and placed in DPKO.The Panel proposes the creation of a new and distinct body of streamlined fieldprocurement policies and procedures; increased delegation of procurement authorityto the field; and greater flexibility for field missions in the management of theirbudgets. The Panel also urges that the Secretary-General formulate and submit to theGeneral Assembly, for its approval, a global logistics support strategy governing thestockpiling of equipment reserves and standing contracts with the private sector forcommon goods and services. In the interim, the Panel recommends that additional“start-up kits” of essential equipment be maintained at the United Nations LogisticsBase (UNLB) in Brindisi, Italy.

The Panel also recommends that the Secretary-General be given authority, withthe approval of the Advisory Committee on Administrative and BudgetaryQuestions (ACABQ) to commit up to $50 million well in advance of the adoption ofa Security Council resolution establishing a new operation once it becomes clearthat an operation is likely to be established.

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Enhance Headquarters capacity to plan and support peace operations(paras. 170-197)

The Panel recommends that Headquarters support for peacekeeping be treatedas a core activity of the United Nations, and as such the majority of its resourcerequirements should be funded through the regular budget of the Organization.DPKO and other offices that plan and support peacekeeping are currently primarilyfunded by the Support Account, which is renewed each year and funds onlytemporary posts. That approach to funding and staff seems to confuse the temporarynature of specific operations with the evident permanence of peacekeeping and otherpeace operations activities as core functions of the United Nations, which isobviously an untenable state of affairs.

The total cost of DPKO and related Headquarters support offices forpeacekeeping does not exceed $50 million per annum, or roughly 2 per cent of totalpeacekeeping costs. Additional resources for those offices are urgently needed toensure that more than $2 billion spent on peacekeeping in 2001 are well spent. ThePanel therefore recommends that the Secretary-General submit a proposal to theGeneral Assembly outlining the Organization’s requirements in full.

The Panel believes that a methodical management review of DPKO should beconducted but also believes that staff shortages in certain areas are plainly obvious.For example, it is clearly not enough to have 32 officers providing military planningand guidance to 27,000 troops in the field, nine civilian police staff to identify, vetand provide guidance for up to 8,600 police, and 15 political desk officers for 14current operations and two new ones, or to allocate just 1.25 per cent of the totalcosts of peacekeeping to Headquarters administrative and logistics support.

Establish Integrated Mission Task Forces for mission planning and support(paras. 198-245)

The Panel recommends that Integrated Mission Task Forces (IMTFs) becreated, with staff from throughout the United Nations system seconded to them, toplan new missions and help them reach full deployment, significantly enhancing thesupport that Headquarters provides to the field. There is currently no integratedplanning or support cell in the Secretariat that brings together those responsible forpolitical analysis, military operations, civilian police, electoral assistance, humanrights, development, humanitarian assistance, refugees and displaced persons, publicinformation, logistics, finance and recruitment.

Structural adjustments are also required in other elements of DPKO, inparticular to the Military and Civilian Police Division, which should be reorganizedinto two separate divisions, and the Field Administration and Logistics Division(FALD), which should be split into two divisions. The Lessons Learned Unit shouldbe strengthened and moved into the DPKO Office of Operations. Public informationplanning and support at Headquarters also needs strengthening, as do elements in theDepartment of Political Affairs (DPA), particularly the electoral unit. Outside theSecretariat, the ability of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner forHuman Rights to plan and support the human rights components of peace operationsneeds to be reinforced.

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Consideration should be given to allocating a third Assistant Secretary-Generalto DPKO and designating one of them as “Principal Assistant Secretary-General”,functioning as the deputy to the Under-Secretary-General.

Adapting peace operations to the information age (paras. 246-264)

Modern, well utilized information technology (IT) is a key enabler of many ofthe above-mentioned objectives, but gaps in strategy, policy and practice impede itseffective use. In particular, Headquarters lacks a sufficiently strong responsibilitycentre for user-level IT strategy and policy in peace operations. A senior officialwith such responsibility in the peace and security arena should be appointed andlocated within EISAS, with counterparts in the offices of the SRSG in every UnitedNations peace operation.

Headquarters and the field missions alike also need a substantive, global,Peace Operations Extranet (POE), through which missions would have access to,among other things, EISAS databases and analyses and lessons learned.

Challenges to implementation (paras. 265-280)

The Panel believes that the above recommendations fall well within the boundsof what can be reasonably demanded of the Organization’s Member States.Implementing some of them will require additional resources for the Organization,but we do not mean to suggest that the best way to solve the problems of the UnitedNations is merely to throw additional resources at them. Indeed, no amount ofmoney or resources can substitute for the significant changes that are urgentlyneeded in the culture of the Organization.

The Panel calls on the Secretariat to heed the Secretary-General’s initiatives toreach out to the institutions of civil society; to constantly keep in mind that theUnited Nations they serve is the universal organization. People everywhere are fullyentitled to consider that it is their organization, and as such to pass judgement on itsactivities and the people who serve in it.

Furthermore, wide disparities in staff quality exist and those in the system arethe first to acknowledge it; better performers are given unreasonable workloads tocompensate for those who are less capable. Unless the United Nations takes steps tobecome a true meritocracy, it will not be able to reverse the alarming trend ofqualified personnel, the young among them in particular, leaving the Organization.Moreover, qualified people will have no incentive to join it. Unless managers at alllevels, beginning with the Secretary-General and his senior staff, seriously addressthis problem on a priority basis, reward excellence and remove incompetence,additional resources will be wasted and lasting reform will become impossible.

Member States also acknowledge that they need to reflect on their workingculture and methods. It is incumbent upon Security Council members, for example,and the membership at large to breathe life into the words that they produce, as did,for instance, the Security Council delegation that flew to Jakarta and Dili in thewake of the East Timor crisis in 1999, an example of effective Council action at itsbest: res, non verba.

We — the members of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations — callon the leaders of the world assembled at the Millennium Summit, as they renewtheir commitment to the ideals of the United Nations, to commit as well to

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strengthen the capacity of the United Nations to fully accomplish the mission whichis, indeed, its very raison d’être: to help communities engulfed in strife and tomaintain or restore peace.

While building consensus for the recommendations in the present report, wehave also come to a shared vision of a United Nations, extending a strong helpinghand to a community, country or region to avert conflict or to end violence. We seean SRSG ending a mission well accomplished, having given the people of a countrythe opportunity to do for themselves what they could not do before: to build andhold onto peace, to find reconciliation, to strengthen democracy, to secure humanrights. We see, above all, a United Nations that has not only the will but also theability to fulfil its great promise, and to justify the confidence and trust placed in itby the overwhelming majority of humankind.

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I. The need for change

1. The United Nations was founded, in the words ofits Charter, in order “to save succeeding generationsfrom the scourge of war.” Meeting this challenge is themost important function of the Organization, and, to avery significant degree, the yardstick by which it isjudged by the peoples it exists to serve. Over the lastdecade, the United Nations has repeatedly failed tomeet the challenge; and it can do no better today.Without significant institutional change, increasedfinancial support, and renewed commitment on the partof Member States, the United Nations will not becapable of executing the critical peacekeeping andpeace-building tasks that the Member States assign it incoming months and years. There are many tasks whichthe United Nations peacekeeping forces should not beasked to undertake, and many places they should notgo. But when the United Nations does send its forces touphold the peace, they must be prepared to confront thelingering forces of war and violence with the abilityand determination to defeat them.

2. The Secretary-General has asked the Panel onUnited Nations Peace Operations, composed ofindividuals experienced in various aspects of conflictprevention, peacekeeping and peace-building (Panelmembers are listed in annex I), to assess theshortcomings of the existing system and to make frank,specific and realistic recommendations for change. Ourrecommendations focus not only on politics andstrategy but also on operational and organizationalareas of need.

3. For preventive initiatives to reduce tension andavert conflict, the Secretary-General needs clear, strongand sustained political support from Member States.For peacekeeping to accomplish its mission, as theUnited Nations has discovered repeatedly over the lastdecade, no amount of good intentions can substitute forthe fundamental ability to project credible force.However, force alone cannot create peace; it can onlycreate a space in which peace can be built.

4. In other words, the key conditions for the successof future complex operations are political support,rapid deployment with a robust force posture and asound peace-building strategy. Every recommendationin the present report is meant, in one way or another, tohelp ensure that these three conditions are met. Theneed for change has been rendered even more urgent byrecent events in Sierra Leone and by the daunting

prospect of expanded United Nations operations in theDemocratic Republic of the Congo.

5. These changes — while essential — will have nolasting impact unless the Member States of theOrganization take seriously their responsibility to trainand equip their own forces and to mandate and enabletheir collective instrument, so that together they maysucceed in meeting threats to peace. They mustsummon the political will to support the UnitedNations politically, financially and operationally —once they have decided to act as the United Nations —if the Organization is to be credible as a force forpeace.

6. The recommendations that the Panel presentsbalance principle and pragmatism, while honouring thespirit and letter of the Charter of the United Nationsand the respective roles of the Organization’slegislative bodies. They are based on the followingpremises:

(a) The essential responsibility of MemberStates for the maintenance of international peace andsecurity, and the need to strengthen both the qualityand quantity of support provided to the United Nationssystem to carry out that responsibility;

(b) The pivotal importance of clear, credibleand adequately resourced Security Council mandates;

(c) A focus by the United Nations system onconflict prevention and its early engagement, whereverpossible;

(d) The need to have more effective collectionand assessment of information at United NationsHeadquarters, including an enhanced conflict earlywarning system that can detect and recognize the threator risk of conflict or genocide;

(e) The essential importance of the UnitedNations system adhering to and promoting internationalhuman rights instruments and standards andinternational humanitarian law in all aspects of itspeace and security activities;

(f) The need to build the United Nationscapacity to contribute to peace-building, bothpreventive and post-conflict, in a genuinely integratedmanner;

(g) The critical need to improve Headquartersplanning (including contingency planning) for peaceoperations;

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(h) The recognition that while the UnitedNations has acquired considerable expertise inplanning, mounting and executing traditionalpeacekeeping operations, it has yet to acquire thecapacity needed to deploy more complex operationsrapidly and to sustain them effectively;

(i) The necessity to provide field missions withhigh-quality leaders and managers who are grantedgreater flexibility and autonomy by Headquarters,within clear mandate parameters and with clearstandards of accountability for both spending andresults;

(j) The imperative to set and adhere to a highstandard of competence and integrity for bothHeadquarters and field personnel, who must beprovided the training and support necessary to do theirjobs and to progress in their careers, guided by modernmanagement practices that reward meritoriousperformance and weed out incompetence;

(k) The importance of holding individualofficials at Headquarters and in the field accountablefor their performance, recognizing that they need to begiven commensurate responsibility, authority andresources to fulfil their assigned tasks.

7. In the present report, the Panel has addresseditself to many compelling needs for change within theUnited Nations system. The Panel views itsrecommendations as the minimum threshold of changeneeded to give the United Nations system theopportunity to be an effective, operational, twenty-firstcentury institution. (Key recommendations aresummarized in bold type throughout the text; they arealso combined in a single summary in annex III.)

8. The blunt criticisms contained in the presentreport reflect the Panel’s collective experience as wellas interviews conducted at every level of the system.More than 200 people were either interviewed orprovided written input to the Panel. Sources includedthe Permanent Missions of Member States, includingthe Security Council members; the Special Committeeon Peacekeeping Operations; and personnel in peaceand security-related departments at United NationsHeadquarters in New York, in the United NationsOffice at Geneva, at the headquarters of the Office ofthe United Nations High Commissioner for HumanRights (OHCHR) and of the Office of the UnitedNations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR),at the headquarters of other United Nations funds and

programmes; at the World Bank and in every currentUnited Nations peace operation. (A list of references iscontained in annex II.)

II. Doctrine, strategy and decision-making for peace operations

9. The United Nations system — namely theMember States, Security Council, General Assemblyand Secretariat — must commit to peace operationscarefully, reflecting honestly on the record of itsperformance over the past decade. It must adjustaccordingly the doctrine upon which peace operationsare established; fine-tune its analytical and decision-making capacities to respond to existing realities andanticipate future requirements; and summon thecreativity, imagination and will required to implementnew and alternative solutions to those situations intowhich peacekeepers cannot or should not go.

A. Defining the elements of peaceoperations

10. United Nations peace operations entail threeprincipal activities: conflict prevention andpeacemaking; peacekeeping; and peace-building. Long-term conflict prevention addresses the structuralsources of conflict in order to build a solid foundationfor peace. Where those foundations are crumbling,conflict prevention attempts to reinforce them, usuallyin the form of a diplomatic initiative. Such preventiveaction is, by definition, a low-profile activity; whensuccessful, it may even go unnoticed altogether.

11. Peacemaking addresses conflicts in progress,attempting to bring them to a halt, using the tools ofdiplomacy and mediation. Peacemakers may be envoysof Governments, groups of States, regionalorganizations or the United Nations, or they may beunofficial and non-governmental groups, as was thecase, for example, in the negotiations leading up to apeace accord for Mozambique. Peacemaking may evenbe the work of a prominent personality, workingindependently.

12. Peacekeeping is a 50-year-old enterprise that hasevolved rapidly in the past decade from a traditional,primarily military model of observing ceasefires andforce separations after inter-State wars, to incorporate acomplex model of many elements, military and

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civilian, working together to build peace in thedangerous aftermath of civil wars.

13. Peace-building is a term of more recent originthat, as used in the present report, defines activitiesundertaken on the far side of conflict to reassemble thefoundations of peace and provide the tools for buildingon those foundations something that is more than justthe absence of war. Thus, peace-building includes butis not limited to reintegrating former combatants intocivilian society, strengthening the rule of law (forexample, through training and restructuring of localpolice, and judicial and penal reform); improvingrespect for human rights through the monitoring,education and investigation of past and existing abuses;providing technical assistance for democraticdevelopment (including electoral assistance andsupport for free media); and promoting conflictresolution and reconciliation techniques.

14. Essential complements to effective peace-building include support for the fight againstcorruption, the implementation of humanitariandemining programmes, emphasis on humanimmunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiencysyndrome (HIV/AIDS) education and control, andaction against other infectious diseases.

B. Experience of the past

15. The quiet successes of short-term conflictprevention and peacemaking are often, as noted,politically invisible. Personal envoys andrepresentatives of the Secretary-General (RSGs) orspecial representatives of the Secretary-General(SRSGs) have at times complemented the diplomaticinitiatives of Member States and, at other times, havetaken initiatives that Member States could not readilyduplicate. Examples of the latter initiatives (drawnfrom peacemaking as well as preventive diplomacy)include the achievement of a ceasefire in the IslamicRepublic of Iran-Iraq war in 1988, the freeing of thelast Western hostages in Lebanon in 1991, andavoidance of war between the Islamic Republic of Iranand Afghanistan in 1998.

16. Those who favour focusing on the underlyingcauses of conflicts argue that such crisis-related effortsoften prove either too little or too late. Attemptedearlier, however, diplomatic initiatives may be rebuffedby a government that does not see or will not

acknowledge a looming problem, or that may itself bepart of the problem. Thus, long-term preventivestrategies are a necessary complement to short-terminitiatives.

17. Until the end of the cold war, United Nationspeacekeeping operations mostly had traditionalceasefire-monitoring mandates and no direct peace-building responsibilities. The “entry strategy” orsequence of events and decisions leading to UnitedNations deployment was straightforward: war,ceasefire, invitation to monitor ceasefire complianceand deployment of military observers or units to do so,while efforts continued for a political settlement.Intelligence requirements were also fairlystraightforward and risks to troops were relatively low.But traditional peacekeeping, which treats thesymptoms rather than sources of conflict, has no built-in exit strategy and associated peacemaking was oftenslow to make progress. As a result, traditionalpeacekeepers have remained in place for 10, 20, 30 oreven 50 years (as in Cyprus, the Middle East andIndia/Pakistan). By the standards of more complexoperations, they are relatively low cost and politicallyeasier to maintain than to remove. However, they arealso difficult to justify unless accompanied by seriousand sustained peacemaking efforts that seek totransform a ceasefire accord into a durable and lastingpeace settlement.

18. Since the end of the cold war, United Nationspeacekeeping has often combined with peace-buildingin complex peace operations deployed into settings ofintra-State conflict. Those conflict settings, however,both affect and are affected by outside actors: politicalpatrons; arms vendors; buyers of illicit commodityexports; regional powers that send their own forces intothe fray; and neighbouring States that host refugeeswho are sometimes systematically forced to flee theirhomes. With such significant cross-border effects bystate and non-state actors alike, these conflicts areoften decidedly “transnational” in character.

19. Risks and costs for operations that must functionin such circumstances are much greater than fortraditional peacekeeping. Moreover, the complexity ofthe tasks assigned to these missions and the volatilityof the situation on the ground tend to increase together.Since the end of the cold war, such complex and riskymandates have been the rule rather than the exception:United Nations operations have been given relief-escort duties where the security situation was so

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dangerous that humanitarian operations could notcontinue without high risk for humanitarian personnel;they have been given mandates to protect civilianvictims of conflict where potential victims were atgreatest risk, and mandates to control heavy weaponsin possession of local parties when those weapons werebeing used to threaten the mission and the localpopulation alike. In two extreme situations, UnitedNations operations were given executive lawenforcement and administrative authority where localauthority did not exist or was not able to function.

20. It should have come as no surprise to anyone thatthese missions would be hard to accomplish. Initially,the 1990s offered more positive prospects: operationsimplementing peace accords were time-limited, ratherthan of indefinite duration, and successful conduct ofnational elections seemed to offer a ready exit strategy.However, United Nations operations since then havetended to deploy where conflict has not resulted invictory for any side: it may be that the conflict isstalemated militarily or that international pressure hasbrought fighting to a halt, but in any event the conflictis unfinished. United Nations operations thus do notdeploy into post-conflict situations so much as theydeploy to create such situations. That is, they work todivert the unfinished conflict, and the personal,political or other agendas that drove it, from themilitary to the political arena, and to make thatdiversion permanent.

21. As the United Nations soon discovered, localparties sign peace accords for a variety of reasons, notall of them favourable to peace. “Spoilers” — groups(including signatories) who renege on theircommitments or otherwise seek to undermine a peaceaccord by violence — challenged peaceimplementation in Cambodia, threw Angola, Somaliaand Sierra Leone back into civil war, and orchestratedthe murder of no fewer than 800,000 people inRwanda. The United Nations must be prepared to dealeffectively with spoilers if it expects to achieve aconsistent record of success in peacekeeping or peace-building in situations of intrastate/transnationalconflict.

22. A growing number of reports on such conflictshave highlighted the fact that would-be spoilers havethe greatest incentive to defect from peace accordswhen they have an independent source of income thatpays soldiers, buys guns, enriches faction leaders andmay even have been the motive for war. Recent history

indicates that, where such income streams from theexport of illicit narcotics, gemstones or other high-value commodities cannot be pinched off, peace isunsustainable.

23. Neighbouring States can contribute to theproblem by allowing passage of conflict-supportingcontraband, serving as middlemen for it or providingbase areas for fighters. To counter such conflict-supporting neighbours, a peace operation will requirethe active political, logistical and/or military support ofone or more great powers, or of major regional powers.The tougher the operation, the more important suchbacking becomes.

24. Other variables that affect the difficulty of peaceimplementation include, first, the sources of theconflict. These can range from economics (e.g., issuesof poverty, distribution, discrimination or corruption),politics (an unalloyed contest for power) and resourceand other environmental issues (such as competitionfor scarce water) to issues of ethnicity, religion or grossviolations of human rights. Political and economicobjectives may be more fluid and open to compromisethan objectives related to resource needs, ethnicity orreligion. Second, the complexity of negotiating andimplementing peace will tend to rise with the numberof local parties and the divergence of their goals (e.g.,some may seek unity, others separation). Third, thelevel of casualties, population displacement andinfrastructure damage will affect the level of war-generated grievance, and thus the difficulty ofreconciliation, which requires that past human rightsviolations be addressed, as well as the cost andcomplexity of reconstruction.

25. A relatively less dangerous environment — justtwo parties, committed to peace, with competitive butcongruent aims, lacking illicit sources of income, withneighbours and patrons committed to peace — is afairly forgiving one. In less forgiving, more dangerousenvironments — three or more parties, of varyingcommitment to peace, with divergent aims, withindependent sources of income and arms, and withneighbours who are willing to buy, sell and transitillicit goods — United Nations missions put not onlytheir own people but peace itself at risk unless theyperform their tasks with the competence and efficiencythat the situation requires and have serious great powerbacking.

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26. It is vitally important that negotiators, theSecurity Council, Secretariat mission planners, andmission participants alike understand which of thesepolitical-military environments they are entering, howthe environment may change under their feet once theyarrive, and what they realistically plan to do if andwhen it does change. Each of these must be factoredinto an operation’s entry strategy and, indeed, into thebasic decision about whether an operation is feasibleand should even be attempted.

27. It is equally important, in this context, to judgethe extent to which local authorities are willing andable to take difficult but necessary political andeconomic decisions and to participate in theestablishment of processes and mechanisms to manageinternal disputes and pre-empt violence or the re-emergence of conflict. These are factors over which afield mission and the United Nations have little control,yet such a cooperative environment is critical indetermining the successful outcome of a peaceoperation.

28. When complex peace operations do go into thefield, it is the task of the operation’s peacekeepers tomaintain a secure local environment for peace-building, and the peacebuilders’ task to support thepolitical, social and economic changes that create asecure environment that is self-sustaining. Only suchan environment offers a ready exit to peacekeepingforces, unless the international community is willing totolerate recurrence of conflict when such forces depart.History has taught that peacekeepers and peacebuildersare inseparable partners in complex operations: whilethe peacebuilders may not be able to function withoutthe peacekeepers’ support, the peacekeepers have noexit without the peacebuilders’ work.

C. Implications for preventive action

29. United Nations peace operations addressed nomore than one third of the conflict situations of the1990s. Because even much-improved mechanisms forcreation and support of United Nations peacekeepingoperations will not enable the United Nations system torespond with such operations in the case of all conflicteverywhere, there is a pressing need for the UnitedNations and its Member States to establish a moreeffective system for long-term conflict prevention.Prevention is clearly far more preferable for those whowould otherwise suffer the consequences of war, and is

a less costly option for the international communitythan military action, emergency humanitarian relief orreconstruction after a war has run its course. As theSecretary-General noted in his recent MillenniumReport (A/54/2000), “every step taken towardsreducing poverty and achieving broad-based economicgrowth is a step toward conflict prevention”. In manycases of internal conflict, “poverty is coupled withsharp ethnic or religious cleavages”, in which minorityrights “are insufficiently respected [and] theinstitutions of government are insufficiently inclusive”.Long-term preventive strategies in such instances musttherefore work “to promote human rights, to protectminority rights and to institute political arrangementsin which all groups are represented. … Every groupneeds to become convinced that the state belongs to allpeople”.

30. The Panel wishes to commend the United Nationsongoing internal Task Force on Peace and Security forits work in the area of long-term prevention, inparticular the notion that development entities in theUnited Nations system should view humanitarian anddevelopment work through a “conflict prevention lens”and make long-term prevention a key focus of theirwork, adapting current tools, such as the commoncountry assessment and the United NationsDevelopment Assistance Framework (UNDAF), to thatend.

31. To improve early United Nations focus onpotential new complex emergencies and thus short-term conflict prevention, about two years ago theHeadquarters Departments that sit on the ExecutiveCommittee on Peace and Security (ECPS) created theInter-Agency/Interdepartmental Framework forCoordination, in which 10 departments, funds,programmes and agencies now participate. The activeelement, the Framework Team, meets at the Directorlevel monthly to decide on areas at risk, schedulecountry (or situation) review meetings and identifypreventive measures. The Framework mechanism hasimproved interdepartmental contacts but has notaccumulated knowledge in a structured way, and doesno strategic planning. This may have contributed to theSecretariat’s difficulty in persuading Member States ofthe advantages of backing their professed commitmentto both long- and short-term conflict preventionmeasures with the requisite political and financialsupport. In the interim, the Secretary-General’s annualreports of 1997 and 1999 (A/52/1 and A/54/1) focused

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specifically on conflict prevention. The CarnegieCommission on Preventing Deadly Conflict and theUnited Nations Association of the United States ofAmerica, among others, also have contributed valuablestudies on the subject. And more than 400 staff in theUnited Nations have undergone systematic training in“early warning” at the United Nations Staff College inTurin.

32. At the heart of the question of short-termprevention lies the use of fact-finding missions andother key initiatives by the Secretary-General. Thesehave, however, usually met with two key impediments.First, there is the understandable and legitimateconcern of Member States, especially the small andweak among them, about sovereignty. Such concernsare all the greater in the face of initiatives taken byanother Member State, especially a stronger neighbour,or by a regional organization that is dominated by oneof its members. A state facing internal difficultieswould more readily accept overtures by the Secretary-General because of the recognized independence andmoral high ground of his position and in view of theletter and spirit of the Charter, which requires that theSecretary-General offer his assistance and expects theMember States to give the United Nations “everyassistance” as indicated, in particular, in Article 2 (5)of the Charter. Fact-finding missions are one tool bywhich the Secretary-General can facilitate theprovision of his good offices.

33. The second impediment to effective crisis-preventive action is the gap between verbal posturesand financial and political support for prevention. TheMillennium Assembly offers all concerned theopportunity to reassess their commitment to this areaand consider the prevention-related recommendationscontained in the Secretary-General’s MillenniumReport and in his recent remarks before the SecurityCouncil’s second open meeting on conflict prevention.There, the Secretary-General emphasized the need forcloser collaboration between the Security Council andother principal organs of the United Nations on conflictprevention issues, and ways to interact more closelywith non-state actors, including the corporate sector, inhelping to defuse or avoid conflicts.

34. Summary of key recommendations onpreventive action:

(a) The Panel endorses the recommendationsof the Secretary-General with respect to conflict

prevention contained in the Millennium Report andin his remarks before the Security Council’s secondopen meeting on conflict prevention in July 2000, inparticular his appeal to “all who are engaged inconflict prevention and development — the UnitedNations, the Bretton Woods institutions,Governments and civil society organizations — [to]address these challenges in a more integratedfashion”;

(b) The Panel supports the Secretary-General’s more frequent use of fact-findingmissions to areas of tension, and stresses MemberStates’ obligations, under Article 2 (5) of theCharter, to give “every assistance” to such activitiesof the United Nations.

D. Implications for peace-buildingstrategy

35. The Security Council and the General Assembly’sSpecial Committee on Peace-keeping Operations haveeach recognized and acknowledged the importance ofpeace-building as integral to the success ofpeacekeeping operations. In this regard, on 29December 1998 the Security Council adopted apresidential statement that encouraged the Secretary-General to “explore the possibility of establishing post-conflict peace-building structures as part of efforts bythe United Nations system to achieve a lasting peacefulsolution to conflicts ...”. The Special Committee onPeacekeeping Operations, in its own report earlier in2000, stressed the importance of defining andidentifying elements of peace-building before they areincorporated into the mandates of complex peaceoperations, so as to facilitate later consideration by theGeneral Assembly of continuing support for keyelements of peace-building after a complex operationdraws to a close.

36. Peace-building support offices or United Nationspolitical offices may be established as follow-ons toother peace operations, as in Tajikistan or Haiti, or asindependent initiatives, as in Guatemala or Guinea-Bissau. They help to support the consolidation of peacein post-conflict countries, working with bothGovernments and non-governmental parties andcomplementing what may be ongoing United Nationsdevelopment activities, which strive to remain apartfrom politics while nonetheless targeting assistance atthe sources of conflict.

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37. Effective peace-building requires activeengagement with the local parties, and that engagementshould be multidimensional in nature. First, all peaceoperations should be given the capacity to make ademonstrable difference in the lives of the people intheir mission area, relatively early in the life of themission. The head of mission should have authority toapply a small percentage of mission funds to “quickimpact projects” aimed at real improvements in qualityof life, to help establish the credibility of a newmission. The resident coordinator/humanitariancoordinator of the pre-existing United Nations countryteam should serve as chief adviser for such projects inorder to ensure efficient spending and to avoid conflictwith other development or humanitarian assistanceprogrammes.

38. Second, “free and fair” elections should beviewed as part of broader efforts to strengthengovernance institutions. Elections will be successfullyheld only in an environment in which a populationrecovering from war comes to accept the ballot overthe bullet as an appropriate and credible mechanismthrough which their views on government arerepresented. Elections need the support of a broaderprocess of democratization and civil society buildingthat includes effective civilian governance and aculture of respect for basic human rights, lest electionsmerely ratify a tyranny of the majority or be overturnedby force after a peace operation leaves.

39. Third, United Nations civilian police monitors arenot peacebuilders if they simply document or attemptto discourage by their presence abusive or otherunacceptable behaviour of local police officers — atraditional and somewhat narrow perspective ofcivilian police capabilities. Today, missions mayrequire civilian police to be tasked to reform, train andrestructure local police forces according tointernational standards for democratic policing andhuman rights, as well as having the capacity to respondeffectively to civil disorder and for self-defence. Thecourts, too, into which local police officers bringalleged criminals and the penal system to which thelaw commits prisoners also must be politicallyimpartial and free from intimidation or duress. Wherepeace-building missions require it, internationaljudicial experts, penal experts and human rightsspecialists, as well as civilian police, must be availablein sufficient numbers to strengthen rule of lawinstitutions. Where justice, reconciliation and the fight

against impunity require it, the Security Council shouldauthorize such experts, as well as relevant criminalinvestigators and forensic specialists, to further thework of apprehension and prosecution of personsindicted for war crimes in support of United Nationsinternational criminal tribunals.

40. While this team approach may seem self-evident,the United Nations has faced situations in the pastdecade where the Security Council has authorized thedeployment of several thousand police in apeacekeeping operation but has resisted the notion ofproviding the same operations with even 20 or 30criminal justice experts. Further, the modern role ofcivilian police needs to be better understood anddeveloped. In short, a doctrinal shift is required in howthe Organization conceives of and utilizes civilianpolice in peace operations, as well as the need for anadequately resourced team approach to upholding therule of law and respect for human rights, throughjudicial, penal, human rights and policing expertsworking together in a coordinated and collegialmanner.

41. Fourth, the human rights component of a peaceoperation is indeed critical to effective peace-building.United Nations human rights personnel can play aleading role, for example, in helping to implement acomprehensive programme for national reconciliation.The human rights components within peace operationshave not always received the political andadministrative support that they require, however, norare their functions always clearly understood by othercomponents. Thus, the Panel stresses the importance oftraining military, police and other civilian personnel onhuman rights issues and on the relevant provisions ofinternational humanitarian law. In this respect, thePanel commends the Secretary-General’s bulletin of 6August 1999 entitled “Observance by United Nationsforces of international humanitarian law”(ST/SGB/1999/13).

42. Fifth, the disarmament, demobilization andreintegration of former combatants — key toimmediate post-conflict stability and reducedlikelihood of conflict recurrence — is an area in whichpeace-building makes a direct contribution to publicsecurity and law and order. But the basic objective ofdisarmament, demobilization and reintegration is notmet unless all three elements of the programme areimplemented. Demobilized fighters (who almost neverfully disarm) will tend to return to a life of violence if

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they find no legitimate livelihood, that is, if they arenot “reintegrated” into the local economy. Thereintegration element of disarmament, demobilizationand reintegration is voluntarily funded, however, andthat funding has sometimes badly lagged behindrequirements.

43. Disarmament, demobilization and reintegrationhas been a feature of at least 15 peacekeepingoperations in the past 10 years. More than a dozenUnited Nations agencies and programmes as well asinternational and local NGOs, fund these programmes.Partly because so many actors are involved in planningor supporting disarmament, demobilization andreintegration, it lacks a designated focal point withinthe United Nations system.

44. Effective peace-building also requires a focalpoint to coordinate the many different activities thatbuilding peace entails. In the view of the Panel, theUnited Nations should be considered the focal point forpeace-building activities by the donor community. Tothat end, there is great merit in creating a consolidatedand permanent institutional capacity within the UnitedNations system. The Panel therefore believes that theUnder-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, inhis/her capacity as Convener of ECPS, should serve asthe focal point for peace-building. The Panel alsosupports efforts under way by the Department ofPolitical Affairs (DPA) and the United NationsDevelopment Programme (UNDP) to jointly strengthenUnited Nations capacity in this area, because effectivepeace-building is, in effect, a hybrid of political anddevelopment activities targeted at the sources ofconflict.

45. DPA, the Department of Political Affairs, theDepartment of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), theOffice for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs(OCHA), the Department of Disarmament Affairs(DDA), the Office of Legal Affairs (OLA), UNDP, theUnited Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), OHCHR,UNHCR, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, and theUnited Nations Security Coordinator are represented inECPS; the World Bank Group has been invited toparticipate as well. ECPS thus provides the ideal forumfor the formulation of peace-building strategies.

46. Nonetheless, a distinction should be madebetween strategy formulation and the implementationof such strategies, based upon a rational division of

labour among ECPS members. In the Panel's view,UNDP has untapped potential in this area, and UNDP,in cooperation with other United Nations agencies,funds and programmes and the World Bank, are bestplaced to take the lead in implementing peace-buildingactivities. The Panel therefore recommends that ECPSpropose to the Secretary-General a plan to strengthenthe capacity of the United Nations to develop peace-building strategies and to implement programmes insupport of those strategies. That plan should alsoindicate the criteria for determining when theappointment of a senior political envoy orrepresentative of the Secretary-General may bewarranted to raise the profile and sharpen the politicalfocus of peace-building activities in a particular regionor country recovering from conflict.

47. Summary of key recommendations on peace-building:

(a) A small percentage of a mission’s first-year budget should be made available to therepresentative or special representative of theSecretary-General leading the mission to fund quickimpact projects in its area of operations, with theadvice of the United Nations country team’sresident coordinator;

(b) The Panel recommends a doctrinal shiftin the use of civilian police, other rule of lawelements and human rights experts in complexpeace operations to reflect an increased focus onstrengthening rule of law institutions and improvingrespect for human rights in post-conflictenvironments;

(c) The Panel recommends that thelegislative bodies consider bringing demobilizationand reintegration programmes into the assessedbudgets of complex peace operations for the firstphase of an operation in order to facilitate the rapiddisassembly of fighting factions and reduce thelikelihood of resumed conflict;

(d) The Panel recommends that theExecutive Committee on Peace and Security discussand recommend to the Secretary-General a plan tostrengthen the permanent capacity of the UnitedNations to develop peace-building strategies and toimplement programmes in support of thosestrategies.

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E. Implications for peacekeeping doctrineand strategy

48. The Panel concurs that consent of the localparties, impartiality and use of force only in self-defence should remain the bedrock principles ofpeacekeeping. Experience shows, however, that in thecontext of modern peace operations dealing with intra-State/transnational conflicts, consent may bemanipulated in many ways by the local parties. A partymay give its consent to United Nations presence merelyto gain time to retool its fighting forces and withdrawconsent when the peacekeeping operation no longerserves its interests. A party may seek to limit anoperation’s freedom of movement, adopt a policy ofpersistent non-compliance with the provisions of anagreement or withdraw its consent altogether.Moreover, regardless of faction leaders’ commitment tothe peace, fighting forces may simply be under muchlooser control than the conventional armies with whichtraditional peacekeepers work, and such forces maysplit into factions whose existence and implicationswere not contemplated in the peace agreement underthe colour of which the United Nations missionoperates.

49. In the past, the United Nations has often founditself unable to respond effectively to such challenges.It is a fundamental premise of the present report,however, that it must be able to do so. Once deployed,United Nations peacekeepers must be able to carry outtheir mandate professionally and successfully. Thismeans that United Nations military units must becapable of defending themselves, other missioncomponents and the mission’s mandate. Rules ofengagement should not limit contingents to stroke-for-stroke responses but should allow ripostes sufficient tosilence a source of deadly fire that is directed at UnitedNations troops or at the people they are charged toprotect and, in particularly dangerous situations, shouldnot force United Nations contingents to cede theinitiative to their attackers.

50. Impartiality for such operations must thereforemean adherence to the principles of the Charter and tothe objectives of a mandate that is rooted in thoseCharter principles. Such impartiality is not the same asneutrality or equal treatment of all parties in all casesfor all time, which can amount to a policy ofappeasement. In some cases, local parties consist not ofmoral equals but of obvious aggressors and victims,

and peacekeepers may not only be operationallyjustified in using force but morally compelled to do so.Genocide in Rwanda went as far as it did in partbecause the international community failed to use or toreinforce the operation then on the ground in thatcountry to oppose obvious evil. The Security Councilhas since established, in its resolution 1296 (2000), thatthe targeting of civilians in armed conflict and thedenial of humanitarian access to civilian populationsafflicted by war may themselves constitute threats tointernational peace and security and thus be triggers forSecurity Council action. If a United Nations peaceoperation is already on the ground, carrying out thoseactions may become its responsibility, and it should beprepared.

51. This means, in turn, that the Secretariat must notapply best-case planning assumptions to situationswhere the local actors have historically exhibitedworst-case behaviour. It means that mandates shouldspecify an operation’s authority to use force. It meansbigger forces, better equipped and more costly, but ableto pose a credible deterrent threat, in contrast to thesymbolic and non-threatening presence thatcharacterizes traditional peacekeeping. United Nationsforces for complex operations should be sized andconfigured so as to leave no doubt in the minds ofwould-be spoilers as to which of the two approachesthe Organization has adopted. Such forces should beafforded the field intelligence and other capabilitiesneeded to mount a defence against violent challengers.

52. Willingness of Member States to contributetroops to a credible operation of this sort also implies awillingness to accept the risk of casualties on behalf ofthe mandate. Reluctance to accept that risk has grownsince the difficult missions of the mid-1990s, partlybecause Member States are not clear about how todefine their national interests in taking such risks, andpartly because they may be unclear about the risksthemselves. In seeking contributions of forces,therefore, the Secretary-General must be able to makethe case that troop contributors and indeed all MemberStates have a stake in the management and resolutionof the conflict, if only as part of the larger enterprise ofestablishing peace that the United Nations represents.In so doing, the Secretary-General should be able togive would-be troop contributors an assessment of riskthat describes what the conflict and the peace areabout, evaluates the capabilities and objectives of thelocal parties, and assesses the independent financial

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resources at their disposal and the implications of thoseresources for the maintenance of peace. The SecurityCouncil and the Secretariat also must be able to win theconfidence of troop contributors that the strategy andconcept of operations for a new mission are sound andthat they will be sending troops or police to serve undera competent mission with effective leadership.

53. The Panel recognizes that the United Nationsdoes not wage war. Where enforcement action isrequired, it has consistently been entrusted to coalitionsof willing States, with the authorization of the SecurityCouncil, acting under Chapter VII of the Charter.

54. The Charter clearly encourages cooperation withregional and subregional organizations to resolveconflict and establish and maintain peace and security.The United Nations is actively and successfullyengaged in many such cooperation programmes in thefield of conflict prevention, peacemaking, elections andelectoral assistance, human rights monitoring andhumanitarian work and other peace-building activitiesin various parts of the world. Where peacekeepingoperations are concerned, however, caution seemsappropriate, because military resources and capabilityare unevenly distributed around the world, and troopsin the most crisis-prone areas are often less preparedfor the demands of modern peacekeeping than is thecase elsewhere. Providing training, equipment,logistical support and other resources to regional andsubregional organizations could enable peacekeepersfrom all regions to participate in a United Nationspeacekeeping operation or to set up regionalpeacekeeping operations on the basis of a SecurityCouncil resolution.

55. Summary of key recommendation onpeacekeeping doctrine and strategy: once deployed,United Nations peacekeepers must be able to carryout their mandates professionally and successfullyand be capable of defending themselves, othermission components and the mission’s mandate,with robust rules of engagement, against those whorenege on their commitments to a peace accord orotherwise seek to undermine it by violence.

F. Clear, credible and achievablemandates

56. As a political body, the Security Council focuseson consensus-building, even though it can takedecisions with less than unanimity. But thecompromises required to build consensus can be madeat the expense of specificity, and the resultingambiguity can have serious consequences in the field ifthe mandate is then subject to varying interpretation bydifferent elements of a peace operation, or if localactors perceive a less than complete Councilcommitment to peace implementation that offersencouragement to spoilers. Ambiguity may also paperover differences that emerge later, under pressure of acrisis, to prevent urgent Council action. While itacknowledges the utility of political compromise inmany cases, the Panel comes down in this case on theside of clarity, especially for operations that willdeploy into dangerous circumstances. Rather than sendan operation into danger with unclear instructions, thePanel urges that the Council refrain from mandatingsuch a mission.

57. The outlines of a possible United Nations peaceoperation often first appear when negotiators workingtoward a peace agreement contemplate United Nationsimplementation of that agreement. Although peacenegotiators (peacemakers) may be skilled professionalsin their craft, they are much less likely to know indetail the operational requirements of soldiers, police,relief providers or electoral advisers in United Nationsfield missions. Non-United Nations peacemakers mayhave even less knowledge of those requirements. Yetthe Secretariat has, in recent years, found itselfrequired to execute mandates that were developedelsewhere and delivered to it via the Security Councilwith but minor changes.

58. The Panel believes that the Secretariat must beable to make a strong case to the Security Council thatrequests for United Nations implementation ofceasefires or peace agreements need to meet certainminimum conditions before the Council commitsUnited Nations-led forces to implement such accords,including the opportunity to have adviser-observerspresent at the peace negotiations; that any agreementbe consistent with prevailing international humanrights standards and humanitarian law; and that tasks tobe undertaken by the United Nations are operationallyachievable — with local responsibility for supporting

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them specified — and either contribute to addressingthe sources of conflict or provide the space required forothers to do so. Since competent advice to negotiatorsmay depend on detailed knowledge of the situation onthe ground, the Secretary-General should be pre-authorized to commit funds from the PeacekeepingReserve Fund sufficient to conduct a preliminary sitesurvey in the prospective mission area.

59. In advising the Council on mission requirements,the Secretariat must not set mission force and otherresource levels according to what it presumes to beacceptable to the Council politically. By self-censoringin that manner, the Secretariat sets up itself and themission not just to fail but to be the scapegoats forfailure. Although presenting and justifying planningestimates according to high operational standardsmight reduce the likelihood of an operation goingforward, Member States must not be led to believe thatthey are doing something useful for countries in troublewhen — by under-resourcing missions — they aremore likely agreeing to a waste of human resources,time and money.

60. Moreover, the Panel believes that until theSecretary-General is able to obtain solid commitmentsfrom Member States for the forces that he or she doesbelieve necessary to carry out an operation, it shouldnot go forward at all. To deploy a partial forceincapable of solidifying a fragile peace would firstraise and then dash the hopes of a population engulfedin conflict or recovering from war, and damage thecredibility of the United Nations as a whole. In suchcircumstances, the Panel believes that the SecurityCouncil should leave in draft form a resolution thatcontemplated sizeable force levels for a newpeacekeeping operation until such time as theSecretary-General could confirm that the necessarytroop commitments had been received from MemberStates.

61. There are several ways to diminish the likelihoodof such commitment gaps, including bettercoordination and consultation between potential troopcontributors and the members of the Security Councilduring the mandate formulation process. Troopcontributor advice to the Security Council mightusefully be institutionalized via the establishment ofad hoc subsidiary organs of the Council, as providedfor in Article 29 of the Charter. Member Statescontributing formed military units to an operationshould as a matter of course be invited to attend

Secretariat briefings of the Security Council pertainingto crises that affect the safety and security of themission’s personnel or to a change or reinterpretationof a mission’s mandate with respect to the use of force.

62. Finally, the desire on the part of the Secretary-General to extend additional protection to civilians inarmed conflicts and the actions of the Security Councilto give United Nations peacekeepers explicit authorityto protect civilians in conflict situations are positivedevelopments. Indeed, peacekeepers — troops orpolice — who witness violence against civilians shouldbe presumed to be authorized to stop it, within theirmeans, in support of basic United Nations principlesand, as stated in the report of the Independent Inquiryon Rwanda, consistent with “the perception and theexpectation of protection created by [an operation’s]very presence” (see S/1999/1257, p. 51).

63. However, the Panel is concerned about thecredibility and achievability of a blanket mandate inthis area. There are hundreds of thousands of civiliansin current United Nations mission areas who areexposed to potential risk of violence, and UnitedNations forces currently deployed could not protectmore than a small fraction of them even if directed todo so. Promising to extend such protection establishesa very high threshold of expectation. The potentiallylarge mismatch between desired objective andresources available to meet it raises the prospect ofcontinuing disappointment with United Nations follow-through in this area. If an operation is given a mandateto protect civilians, therefore, it also must be given thespecific resources needed to carry out that mandate.

64. Summary of key recommendations on clear,credible and achievable mandates:

(a) The Panel recommends that, before theSecurity Council agrees to implement a ceasefire orpeace agreement with a United Nations-ledpeacekeeping operation, the Council assure itselfthat the agreement meets threshold conditions, suchas consistency with international human rightsstandards and practicability of specified tasks andtimelines;

(b) The Security Council should leave indraft form resolutions authorizing missions withsizeable troop levels until such time as theSecretary-General has firm commitments of troopsand other critical mission support elements,

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including peace-building elements, from MemberStates;

(c) Security Council resolutions should meetthe requirements of peacekeeping operations whenthey deploy into potentially dangerous situations,especially the need for a clear chain of commandand unity of effort;

(d) The Secretariat must tell the SecurityCouncil what it needs to know, not what it wants tohear, when formulating or changing missionmandates, and countries that have committedmilitary units to an operation should have access toSecretariat briefings to the Council on mattersaffecting the safety and security of their personnel,especially those meetings with implications for amission’s use of force.

G. Information-gathering, analysis, andstrategic planning capacities

65. A strategic approach by the United Nations toconflict prevention, peacekeeping and peace-buildingwill require that the Secretariat’s key implementingdepartments in peace and security work more closelytogether. To do so, they will need sharper tools togather and analyse relevant information and to supportECPS, the nominal high-level decision-making forumfor peace and security issues.

66. ECPS is one of four “sectoral” executivecommittees established in the Secretary-General’sinitial reform package of early 1997 (see A/51/829,sect. A). The Committees for Economic and SocialAffairs, Development Operations, and HumanitarianAffairs were also established. OHCHR is a member ofall four. These committees were designed to “facilitatemore concerted and coordinated management” acrossparticipating departments and were given “executivedecision-making as well as coordinating powers.”Chaired by the Under-Secretary-General for PoliticalAffairs, ECPS has promoted greater exchange ofinformation across and cooperation betweendepartments, but it has not yet become the decision-making body that the 1997 reforms envisioned, whichits participants acknowledge.

67. Current Secretariat staffing levels and jobdemands in the peace and security sector more or lesspreclude departmental policy planning. Although mostECPS members have policy or planning units, they

tend to be drawn into day-to-day issues. Yet withoutsignificant knowledge generating and analytic capacity,the Secretariat will remain a reactive institution unableto get ahead of daily events, and ECPS will not be ableto fulfil the role for which it was created.

68. The Secretary-General and the members of ECPSneed a professional system in the Secretariat foraccumulating knowledge about conflict situations,distributing that knowledge efficiently to a wide userbase, generating policy analyses and formulating long-term strategies. That system does not exist at present.The Panel proposes that it be created as the ECPSInformation and Strategic Analysis Secretariat, orEISAS.

69. The bulk of EISAS should be formed byconsolidation of the various departmental units that areassigned policy and information analysis roles relatedto peace and security, including the Policy AnalysisUnit and the Situation Centre of DPKO; the PolicyPlanning Unit of DPA; the Policy Development Unit(or elements thereof) of OCHA; and the MediaMonitoring and Analysis Section of the Department ofPublic Information (DPI).

70. Additional staff would be required to give EISASexpertise that does not exist elsewhere in the system orthat cannot be taken from existing structures. Theseadditions would include a head of the staff (at Directorlevel), a small team of military analysts, police expertsand highly qualified information systems analysts whowould be responsible for managing the design andmaintenance of EISAS databases and their accessibilityto both Headquarters and field offices and missions.

71. Close affiliates of EISAS should include theStrategic Planning Unit of the Office of the Secretary-General; the Emergency Response Division of UNDP;the Peace-building Unit (see paras. 239-243 below);the Information Analysis Unit of OCHA (whichsupports Relief Web); the New York liaison offices ofOHCHR and UNHCR; the Office of the United NationsSecurity Coordinator; and the Monitoring, Databaseand Information Branch of DDA. The World BankGroup should be invited to maintain liaison, usingappropriate elements, such as the Bank’s Post-ConflictUnit.

72. As a common service, EISAS would be of bothshort-term and long-term value to ECPS members. Itwould strengthen the daily reporting function of theDPKO Situation Centre, generating all-source updates

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on mission activity and relevant global events. It couldbring a budding crisis to the attention of ECPSleadership and brief them on that crisis using modernpresentation techniques. It could serve as a focal pointfor timely analysis of cross-cutting thematic issues andpreparation of reports for the Secretary-General onsuch issues. Finally, based on the prevailing mix ofmissions, crises, interests of the legislative bodies andinputs from ECPS members, EISAS could propose andmanage the agenda of ECPS itself, support itsdeliberations and help to transform it into the decision-making body anticipated in the Secretary-General’sinitial reforms.

73. EISAS should be able to draw upon the bestavailable expertise — inside and outside the UnitedNations system — to fine-tune its analyses with regardto particular places and circumstances. It shouldprovide the Secretary-General and ECPS members withconsolidated assessments of United Nations and otherefforts to address the sources and symptoms of ongoingand looming conflicts, and should be able to assess thepotential utility — and implications — of furtherUnited Nations involvement. It should provide thebasic background information for the initial work ofthe Integrated Mission Task Forces (ITMFs) that thePanel recommends below (see paras. 198-217), beestablished to plan and support the set up of peaceoperations, and continue to provide analyses andmanage the information flow between mission andTask Force once the mission has been established.

74. EISAS should create, maintain and draw uponshared, integrated, databases that would eventuallyreplace the proliferated copies of code cables, dailysituation reports, daily news feeds and informalconnections with knowledgeable colleagues that deskofficers and decision makers alike currently use to keepinformed of events in their areas of responsibility. Withappropriate safeguards, such databases could be madeavailable to users of a peace operations Intranet (seeparas. 255 and 256 below). Such databases, potentiallyavailable to Headquarters and field alike viaincreasingly cheap commercial broadbandcommunications services, would help to revolutionizethe manner in which the United Nations accumulatesknowledge and analyses key peace and security issues.EISAS should also eventually supersede theFramework for Coordination mechanism.

75. Summary of key recommendation oninformation and strategic analysis: the Secretary-

General should establish an entity, referred to hereas the ECPS Information and Strategic AnalysisSecretariat (EISAS), that would support theinformation and analysis needs of all members ofECPS; for management purposes, it should beadministered by and report jointly to the heads ofDPA and DPKO.

H. The challenge of transitional civiladministration

76. Until mid-1999, the United Nations hadconducted just a small handful of field operations withelements of civil administration conduct or oversight.In June 1999, however, the Secretariat found itselfdirected to develop a transitional civil administrationfor Kosovo, and three months later for East Timor. Thestruggles of the United Nations to set up and managethose operations are part of the backdrop to thenarratives on rapid deployment and on Headquartersstaffing and structure in the present report.

77. These operations face challenges andresponsibilities that are unique among United Nationsfield operations. No other operations must set andenforce the law, establish customs services andregulations, set and collect business and personal taxes,attract foreign investment, adjudicate property disputesand liabilities for war damage, reconstruct and operateall public utilities, create a banking system, run schoolsand pay teachers and collect the garbage — in a war-damaged society, using voluntary contributions,because the assessed mission budget, even for such“transitional administration” missions, does not fundlocal administration itself. In addition to such tasks,these missions must also try to rebuild civil society andpromote respect for human rights, in places wheregrievance is widespread and grudges run deep.

78. Beyond such challenges lies the larger question ofwhether the United Nations should be in this businessat all, and if so whether it should be considered anelement of peace operations or should be managed bysome other structure. Although the Security Councilmay not again direct the United Nations to dotransitional civil administration, no one expected it todo so with respect to Kosovo or East Timor either.Intra-State conflicts continue and future instability ishard to predict, so that despite evident ambivalenceabout civil administration among United NationsMember States and within the Secretariat, other such

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missions may indeed be established in the future andon an equally urgent basis. Thus, the Secretariat facesan unpleasant dilemma: to assume that transitionaladministration is a transitory responsibility, not preparefor additional missions and do badly if it is once againflung into the breach, or to prepare well and be askedto undertake them more often because it is wellprepared. Certainly, if the Secretariat anticipates futuretransitional administrations as the rule rather than theexception, then a dedicated and distinct responsibilitycentre for those tasks must be created somewherewithin the United Nations system. In the interim,DPKO has to continue to support this function.

79. Meanwhile, there is a pressing issue intransitional civil administration that must be addressed,and that is the issue of “applicable law.” In the twolocales where United Nations operations now have lawenforcement responsibility, local judicial and legalcapacity was found to be non-existent, out of practiceor subject to intimidation by armed elements.Moreover, in both places, the law and legal systemsprevailing prior to the conflict were questioned orrejected by key groups considered to be the victims ofthe conflicts.

80. Even if the choice of local legal code were clear,however, a mission’s justice team would face theprospect of learning that code and its associatedprocedures well enough to prosecute and adjudicatecases in court. Differences in language, culture, customand experience mean that the learning process couldeasily take six months or longer. The United Nationscurrently has no answer to the question of what such anoperation should do while its law and order teaminches up such a learning curve. Powerful localpolitical factions can and have taken advantage of thelearning period to set up their own paralleladministrations, and crime syndicates gladly exploitwhatever legal or enforcement vacuums they can find.

81. These missions’ tasks would have been mucheasier if a common United Nations justice package hadallowed them to apply an interim legal code to whichmission personnel could have been pre-trained whilethe final answer to the “applicable law” question wasbeing worked out. Although no work is currently underway within Secretariat legal offices on this issue,interviews with researchers indicate that some headwaytoward dealing with the problem has been made outsidethe United Nations system, emphasizing the principles,guidelines, codes and procedures contained in several

dozen international conventions and declarationsrelating to human rights, humanitarian law, andguidelines for police, prosecutors and penal systems.

82. Such research aims at a code that contains thebasics of both law and procedure to enable an operationto apply due process using international jurists andinternationally agreed standards in the case of suchcrimes as murder, rape, arson, kidnapping andaggravated assault. Property law would probablyremain beyond reach of such a “model code”, but atleast an operation would be able to prosecuteeffectively those who burned their neighbours’ homeswhile the property law issue was being addressed.

83. Summary of key recommendation ontransitional civil administration: the Panelrecommends that the Secretary-General invite apanel of international legal experts, includingindividuals with experience in United Nationsoperations that have transitional administrationmandates, to evaluate the feasibility and utility ofdeveloping an interim criminal code, including anyregional adaptations potentially required, for use bysuch operations pending the re-establishment oflocal rule of law and local law enforcement capacity.

III. United Nations capacities to deployoperations rapidly and effectively

84. Many observers have questioned why it takes solong for the United Nations to fully deploy operationsfollowing the adoption of a Security Councilresolution. The reasons are several. The United Nationsdoes not have a standing army, and it does not have astanding police force designed for field operations.There is no reserve corps of mission leadership: specialrepresentatives of the Secretary-General and heads ofmission, force commanders, police commissioners,directors of administration and other leadershipcomponents are not sought until urgently needed. TheStandby Arrangements System (UNSAS) currently inplace for potential government-provided military,police and civilian expertise has yet to become adependable supply of resources. The stockpile ofessential equipment recycled from the large missions ofthe mid-1990s to the United Nations Logistics Base(UNLB) at Brindisi, Italy, has been depleted by thecurrent surge in missions and there is as yet nobudgetary vehicle for rebuilding it quickly. The

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peacekeeping procurement process may not adequatelybalance its responsibilities for cost-effectiveness andfinancial responsibility against overriding operationalneeds for timely response and mission credibility. Theneed for standby arrangements for the recruitment ofcivilian personnel in substantive and support areas haslong been recognized but not yet implemented. Andfinally, the Secretary-General lacks most of theauthority to acquire, hire and preposition the goods andpeople needed to deploy an operation rapidly beforethe Security Council adopts the resolution to establishit, however likely such an operation may seem.

85. In short, few of the basic building blocks are inplace for the United Nations to rapidly acquire anddeploy the human and material resources required tomount any complex peace operation in the future.

A. Defining what “rapid and effectivedeployment” entails

86. The proceedings of the Security Council, thereports of the Special Committee on PeacekeepingOperations and input provided to the Panel by the fieldmissions, the Secretariat and the Member States allagree on the need for the United Nations tosignificantly strengthen capacity to deploy new fieldoperations rapidly and effectively. In order tostrengthen these capacities, the United Nations mustfirst agree on basic parameters for defining what“rapidity” and “effectiveness” entail.

87. The first six to 12 weeks following a ceasefire orpeace accord is often the most critical period forestablishing both a stable peace and the credibility ofthe peacekeepers. Credibility and political momentumlost during this period can often be difficult to regain.Deployment timelines should thus be tailoredaccordingly. However, the speedy deployment ofmilitary, civilian police and civilian expertise will nothelp to solidify a fragile peace and establish thecredibility of an operation if these personnel are notequipped to do their job. To be effective, the missions’personnel need materiel (equipment and logisticssupport), finance (cash in hand to procure goods andservices) information assets (training and briefing), anoperational strategy and, for operations deploying intouncertain circumstances, a military and political“centre of gravity” sufficient to enable it to anticipateand overcome one or more of the parties’ secondthoughts about taking a peace process forward.

88. Timelines for rapid and effective deployment willnaturally vary in accordance with the politico-militarysituations that are unique to each post-conflictenvironment. Nevertheless, the first step in enhancingthe United Nations capacity for rapid deployment mustbegin with agreeing upon a standard towards which theOrganization should strive. No such standard yet exists.The Panel thus proposes that the United Nationsdevelop the operational capabilities to fully deploy“traditional” peacekeeping operations within 30 daysof the adoption of a Security Council resolution, andcomplex peacekeeping operations within 90 days. Inthe case of the latter, the mission headquarters shouldbe fully installed and functioning within 15 days.

89. In order to meet these timelines, the Secretariatwould need one or a combination of the following:(a) standing reserves of military, civilian police andcivilian expertise, materiel and financing;(b) extremely reliable standby capacities to be calledupon on short notice; or (c) sufficient lead-time toacquire these resources, which would require theability to foresee, plan for and initiate spending forpotential new missions several months ahead of time.A number of the Panel’s recommendations are directedat strengthening the Secretariat’s analytical capacitiesand aligning them with the mission planning process inorder to help the United Nations be better prepared forpotential new operations. However, neither theoutbreak of war nor the conclusion of peace can alwaysbe predicted well in advance. In fact, experience hasshown that this is often not the case. Thus, theSecretariat must be able to maintain a certain genericlevel of preparedness, through the establishment ofnew standing capacities and enhancement of existingstandby capacities, so as to be prepared for unforeseendemands.

90. Many Member States have argued against theestablishment of a standing United Nations army orpolice force, resisted entering into reliable standbyarrangements, cautioned against the incursion offinancial expenses for building a reserve of equipmentor discouraged the Secretariat from undertakingplanning for potential operations prior to the Secretary-General having been granted specific, crisis-drivenlegislative authority to do so. Under thesecircumstances, the United Nations cannot deployoperations “rapidly and effectively” within thetimelines suggested. The analysis that follows argues

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that at least some of these circumstances must changeto make rapid and effective deployment possible.

91. Summary of key recommendation ondetermining deployment timelines: the UnitedNations should define “rapid and effectivedeployment capacities” as the ability, from anoperational perspective, to fully deploy traditionalpeacekeeping operations within 30 days after theadoption of a Security Council resolution, andwithin 90 days in the case of complex peacekeepingoperations.

B. Effective mission leadership

92. Effective, dynamic leadership can make thedifference between a cohesive mission with highmorale and effectiveness despite adversecircumstances, and one that struggles to maintain anyof those attributes. That is, the tenor of an entiremission can be heavily influenced by the character andability of those who lead it.

93. Given this critical role, the current UnitedNations approach to recruiting, selecting, training andsupporting its mission leaders leaves major room forimprovement. Lists of potential candidates areinformally maintained. RSGs and SRSGs, heads ofmission, force commanders, civilian policecommissioners and their respective deputies may notbe selected until close to or even after adoption of aSecurity Council resolution establishing a new mission.They and other heads of substantive and administrativecomponents may not meet one another until they reachthe mission area, following a few days of introductorymeetings with Headquarters officials. They will begiven generic terms of reference that spell out theiroverall roles and responsibilities, but rarely will theyleave Headquarters with mission-specific policy oroperational guidance in hand. Initially, at least, theywill determine on their own how to implement theSecurity Council’s mandate and how to deal withpotential challenges to implementation. They mustdevelop a strategy for implementing the mandate whiletrying to establish the mission’s political/militarycentre of gravity and sustain a potentially fragile peaceprocess.

94. Factoring in the politics of selection makes theprocess somewhat more understandable. Politicalsensitivities about a new mission may preclude the

Secretary-General’s canvassing potential candidatesmuch before a mission has been established. Inselecting SRSGs, RSGs or other heads of mission, theSecretary-General must consider the views of SecurityCouncil members, the States within the region and thelocal parties, the confidence of each of whom anRSG/SRSG needs in order to be effective. The choiceof one or more deputy SRSGs may be influenced bythe need to achieve geographic distribution within themission’s leadership. The nationality of the forcecommander, the police commissioner and their deputieswill need to reflect the composition of the military andpolice components, and will also need to consider thepolitical sensitivities of the local parties.

95. Although political and geographic considerationsare legitimate, in the Panel’s view managerial talentand experience must be accorded at least equal priorityin choosing mission leadership. Based on the personalexperiences of several of its members in leading fieldoperations, the Panel endorses the need to assemble theleadership of a mission as early as possible, so thatthey can jointly help to shape a mission’s concept ofoperations, its support plan, its budget and its staffingarrangements.

96. To facilitate early selection, the Panelrecommends that the Secretary-General compile, in asystematic fashion, and with input from MemberStates, a comprehensive list of potential SRSGs, forcecommanders, police commissioners and potentialdeputies, as well as candidates to head othersubstantive components of a mission, representing abroad geographic and equitable gender distribution.Such a database would facilitate early identificationand selection of the leadership group.

97. The Secretariat should, as a matter of standardpractice, provide mission leadership with strategicguidance and plans for anticipating and overcomingchallenges to mandate implementation and, wheneverpossible, formulate such guidance and plans togetherwith the mission leadership. The leadership should alsoconsult widely with the United Nations residentcountry team and with NGOs working in the missionarea to broaden and deepen its local knowledge, whichis critical to implementing a comprehensive strategyfor transition from war to peace. The country team’sresident coordinator should be included morefrequently in the formal mission planning process.

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98. The Panel believes that there should always be atleast one member of the senior management team of amission with relevant United Nations experience,preferably both in a field mission and at Headquarters.Such an individual would facilitate the work of thosemembers of the management team from outside theUnited Nations system, shortening the time they wouldotherwise need to become familiar with theOrganization’s rules, regulations, policies and workingmethods, answering the sorts of questions that pre-deployment training cannot anticipate.

99. The Panel notes the precedent of appointing theresident coordinator/humanitarian coordinator of theteam of United Nations agencies, funds andprogrammes engaged in development work andhumanitarian assistance in a particular country as oneof the deputies to the SRSG of a complex peaceoperation. In our view, this practice should be emulatedwherever possible.

100. Conversely, it is critical that field representativesof United Nations agencies, funds and programmesfacilitate the work of an SRSG or RSG in his or herrole as the coordinator of all United Nations activitiesin the country concerned. On a number of occasions,attempts to perform this role have been hampered byoverly bureaucratic resistance to coordination. Suchtendencies do not do justice to the concept of theUnited Nations family that the Secretary-General hastried hard to encourage.

101. Summary of key recommendations on missionleadership:

(a) The Secretary-General shouldsystematize the method of selecting mission leaders,beginning with the compilation of a comprehensivelist of potential representatives or specialrepresentatives of the Secretary-General, forcecommanders, civilian police commissioners andtheir deputies and other heads of substantive andadministrative components, within a fairgeographic and gender distribution and with inputfrom Member States;

(b) The entire leadership of a mission shouldbe selected and assembled at Headquarters as earlyas possible in order to enable their participation inkey aspects of the mission planning process, forbriefings on the situation in the mission area and tomeet and work with their colleagues in missionleadership;

(c) The Secretariat should routinely providethe mission leadership with strategic guidance andplans for anticipating and overcoming challenges tomandate implementation and, whenever possible,should formulate such guidance and plans togetherwith the mission leadership.

C. Military personnel

102. The United Nations launched UNSAS in the mid-1990s in order to enhance its rapid deploymentcapabilities and to enable it to respond to theunpredictable and exponential growth in theestablishment of the new generation of complexpeacekeeping operations. UNSAS is a database ofmilitary, civilian police and civilian assets andexpertise indicated by Governments to be available, intheory, for deployment to United Nations peacekeepingoperations at seven, 15, 30, 60 or 90 days’ notice. Thedatabase currently includes 147,900 personnel from 87Member States: 85,000 in military combat units;56,700 in military support elements; 1,600 militaryobservers; 2,150 civilian police; and 2,450 othercivilian specialists. Of the 87 participating States, 31have concluded memoranda of understanding with theUnited Nations enumerating their responsibilities forpreparedness of the personnel concerned, but the samememoranda also codify the conditional nature of theircommitment. In essence, the memorandum ofunderstanding confirms that States maintain theirsovereign right to “just say no” to a request from theSecretary-General to contribute those assets to anoperation.

103. The absence of detailed statistics on responsesnotwithstanding, many Member States are saying “no”to deploying formed military units to United Nations-led peacekeeping operations, far more often than theyare saying “yes”. In contrast to the long tradition ofdeveloped countries providing the bulk of the troopsfor United Nations peacekeeping operations during theOrganization’s first 50 years, in the last few years 77per cent of the troops in formed military units deployedin United Nations peacekeeping operations, as of end-June 2000, were contributed by developing countries.

104. The five Permanent Members of the SecurityCouncil are currently contributing far fewer troops toUnited Nations-led operations, but four of the five havecontributed sizeable forces to the North Atlantic TreatyOrganization (NATO)-led operations in Bosnia and

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Herzegovina and Kosovo that provide a secureenvironment in which the United Nations Mission inBosnia and Herzegovina (UNMIBH) and the UnitedNations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo(UNMIK) can function. The United Kingdom alsodeployed troops to Sierra Leone at a critical point inthe crisis (outside United Nations operational control),providing a valuable stabilizing influence, but nodeveloped country currently contributes troops to themost difficult United Nations-led peacekeepingoperations from a security perspective, namely theUnited Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL)and the United Nations Organization Mission in theDemocratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC).

105. Memories of peacekeepers murdered inMogadishu and Kigali and taken hostage in SierraLeone help to explain the difficulties Member Statesare having in convincing their national legislatures andpublic that they should support the deployment of theirtroops to United Nations-led operations, particularly inAfrica. Moreover, developed States tend not to seestrategic national interests at stake. The downsizing ofnational military forces and the growth in Europeanregional peacekeeping initiatives further depletes thepool of well-trained and well-equipped militarycontingents from developed countries to serve inUnited Nations-led operations.

106. Thus, the United Nations is facing a very seriousdilemma. A mission such as UNAMSIL wouldprobably not have faced the difficulties that it did inspring 2000 had it been provided with forces as strongas those currently keeping the peace as part of KFORin Kosovo. The Panel is convinced that NATO militaryplanners would not have agreed to deploy to SierraLeone with only the 6,000 troops initially authorized.Yet, the likelihood of a KFOR-type operation beingdeployed in Africa in the near future seems remotegiven current trends. Even if the United Nations wereto attempt to deploy a KFOR-type force, it is not clear,given current standby arrangements, where the troopsand equipment would come from.

107. A number of developing countries do respond torequests for peacekeeping forces with troops who servewith distinction and dedication according to very highprofessional standards, and in accord with newcontingent-owned equipment (COE) procedures (“wetlease” agreements) adopted by the General Assembly,which provide that national troop contingents are tobring with them almost all the equipment and supplies

required to sustain their troops. The United Nationscommits to reimburse troop contributors for use oftheir equipment and to provide those services andsupport not covered under the new COE procedures. Inreturn, the troop contributing nations undertake tohonour the memoranda of understanding on COEprocedures that they sign.

108. Yet, the Secretary-General finds himself in anuntenable position. He is given a Security Councilresolution specifying troop levels on paper, but withoutknowing whether he will be given the troops to put onthe ground. The troops that eventually arrive in theatremay still be underequipped: Some countries haveprovided soldiers without rifles, or with rifles but nohelmets, or with helmets but no flak jackets, or with noorganic transport capability (trucks or troops carriers).Troops may be untrained in peacekeeping operations,and in any case the various contingents in an operationare unlikely to have trained or worked together before.Some units may have no personnel who can speak themission language. Even if language is not a problem,they may lack common operating procedures and havediffering interpretations of key elements of commandand control and of the mission’s rules of engagement,and may have differing expectations about missionrequirements for the use of force.

109. This must stop. Troop-contributing countries thatcannot meet the terms of their memoranda ofunderstanding should so indicate to the United Nations,and must not deploy. To that end, the Secretary-Generalshould be given the resources and support needed toassess potential troop contributors’ preparedness priorto deployment, and to confirm that the provisions ofthe memoranda will be met.

110. A further step towards improving the currentsituation would be to give the Secretary-General acapability for assembling, on short notice, militaryplanners, staff officers and other military technicalexperts, preferably with prior United Nations missionexperience, to liaise with mission planners atHeadquarters and to then deploy to the field with a coreelement from DPKO to help establish a mission’smilitary headquarters, as authorized by the SecurityCouncil. Using the current Standby ArrangementsSystem, an “on-call list” of such personnel, nominatedby Member States within a fair geographic distributionand carefully vetted and accepted by DPKO, could beformed for this purpose and for strengthening ongoingmissions in times of crisis. Personnel assigned to this

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on-call list of about 100 officers would be at the rankof Major to Colonel and would be treated, upon theirshort-notice call-up, as United Nations militaryobservers, with appropriate modifications.

111. Personnel selected for inclusion in the on-call listwould be pre-qualified medically and administrativelyfor deployment worldwide, would participate inadvance training and would incur a commitment of upto two years for immediate deployment within 7-daysnotification. Every three months, the on-call list wouldbe updated with some 10 to 15 new personnel, asnominated by Member States, to be trained during aninitial three-month period. With continuous updatingevery three months, the on-call list would containabout five to seven teams ready for short-noticedeployment. Initial team training would include at theoutset a pre-qualification and education phase (briefone-week classroom and apprentice instruction inUnited Nations systems), followed by a hands-onprofessional development phase (deployment to anongoing United Nations peacekeeping operation as amilitary observer team for about 10 weeks). After thisinitial three-month team training period, individualofficers would then return to their countries andassume an on-call status.

112. Upon Security Council authorization, one or moreof these teams could be called up for immediate duty.They would travel to United Nations Headquarters forrefresher orientation and specific mission guidance, asnecessary, and interaction with the planners of theIntegrated Mission Task Force (see paras. 198-217below) for that operation, before deploying to the field.The teams’ mission would be to translate the broadstrategic-level concepts of the mission developed byIMTF into concrete operational and tactical plans, andto undertake immediate coordination and liaison tasksin advance of the deployment of troop contingents.Once deployed, an advance team would remainoperational until replaced by deploying contingents(usually about 2 to 3 months, but longer if necessary,up to a six-month term).

113. Funding for a team's initial training would comefrom the budget of the ongoing mission in which theteam is deployed for initial training, and funding for anon-call deployment would come from the prospectivepeacekeeping mission budget. The United Nationswould incur no costs for such personnel while theywere on on-call status in their home country as theywould be performing normal duties in their national

armed forces. The Panel recommends that theSecretary-General outline this proposal withimplementing details to the Member States forimmediate implementation within the parameters of theexisting Standby Arrangements System.

114. Such an emergency military field planning andliaison staff capacity would not be enough, however, toensure force coherence. In our view, in order tofunction as a coherent force the troop contingentsthemselves should at least have been trained andequipped according to a common standard,supplemented by joint planning at the contingents’command level. Ideally, they will have had theopportunity to conduct joint training field exercises.

115. If United Nations military planners assess that abrigade (approximately 5,000 troops) is what isrequired to effectively deter or deal with violentchallenges to the implementation of an operation’smandate, then the military component of that UnitedNations operation ought to deploy as a brigadeformation, not as a collection of battalions that areunfamiliar with one another’s doctrine, leadership andoperational practices. That brigade would have to comefrom a group of countries that have been workingtogether as suggested above to develop commontraining and equipment standards, common doctrine,and common arrangements for the operational controlof the force. Ideally, UNSAS should contain severalcoherent such brigade-size forces, with the necessaryenabling forces, available for full deployment to anoperation within 30 days in the case of traditionalpeacekeeping operations and within 90 days in the caseof complex operations.

116. To that end, the United Nations should establishthe minimum training, equipment and other standardsrequired for forces to participate in United Nationspeacekeeping operations. Member States with themeans to do so could form partnerships, within thecontext of UNSAS, to provide financial, equipment,training and other assistance to troop contributors fromless developed countries to enable them to reach andmaintain that minimum standard, with the goal thateach of the brigades so established should be ofcomparably high quality and be able to call uponeffective levels of operational support. Such aformation has been the objective of the Standing High-Readiness Brigade (SHIRBRIG) group of States, whohave also established a command-level planningelement that works together routinely. However, the

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proposed arrangement is not intended as a mechanismfor relieving some States from their responsibilities toparticipate actively in United Nations peacekeepingoperations or for precluding the participation of smallerStates in such operations.

117. Summary of key recommendations on militarypersonnel:

(a) Member States should be encouraged,where appropriate, to enter into partnerships withone another, within the context of the UnitedNations Standby Arrangements System (UNSAS), toform several coherent brigade-size forces, withnecessary enabling forces, ready for effectivedeployment within 30 days of the adoption of aSecurity Council resolution establishing atraditional peacekeeping operation and within 90days for complex peacekeeping operations;

(b) The Secretary-General should be giventhe authority to formally canvass Member Statesparticipating in UNSAS regarding their willingnessto contribute troops to a potential operation once itappeared likely that a ceasefire accord oragreement envisaging an implementing role for theUnited Nations might be reached;

(c) The Secretariat should, as a standardpractice, send a team to confirm the preparednessof each potential troop contributor to meet theprovisions of the memoranda of understanding onthe requisite training and equipment requirements,prior to deployment; those that do not meet therequirements must not deploy;

(d) The Panel recommends that a revolving“on-call list” of about 100 military officers becreated in UNSAS to be available on seven days’notice to augment nuclei of DPKO planners withteams trained to create a mission headquarters for anew peacekeeping operation.

D. Civilian police

118. Civilian police are second only to military forcesin numbers of international personnel involved inUnited Nations peacekeeping operations. Demand forcivilian police operations dealing with intra-Stateconflict is likely to remain high on any list ofrequirements for helping a war-torn society restoreconditions for social, economic and political stability.

The fairness and impartiality of the local police force,which civilian police monitor and train, is crucial tomaintaining a safe and secure environment, and itseffectiveness is vital where intimidation and criminalnetworks continue to obstruct progress on the politicaland economic fronts.

119. The Panel has accordingly argued (see paras. 39,40 and 47 (b) above) for a doctrinal shift in the use ofcivilian police in United Nations peace operations, tofocus primarily on the reform and restructuring of localpolice forces in addition to traditional advisory,training and monitoring tasks. This shift will requireMember States to provide the United Nations with evenmore well-trained and specialized police experts, at atime when they face difficulties meeting currentrequirements. As of 1 August 2000, 25 per cent of the8,641 police positions authorized for United Nationsoperations remained vacant.

120. Whereas Member States may face domesticpolitical difficulties in sending military units to UnitedNations peace operations, Governments tend to facefewer political constraints in contributing their civilianpolice to peace operations. However, Member Statesstill have practical difficulties doing so, because thesize and configuration of their police forces tend to betailored to domestic needs alone.

121. Under the circumstances, the process ofidentifying, securing the release of and training policeand related justice experts for mission service is oftentime-consuming, and prevents the United Nations fromdeploying a mission’s civilian police componentrapidly and effectively. Moreover, the policecomponent of a mission may comprise officers drawnfrom up to 40 countries who have never met oneanother before, have little or no United Nationsexperience, and have received little relevant training ormission-specific briefings, and whose policingpractices and doctrines may vary widely. Moreover,civilian police generally rotate out of operations aftersix months to one year. All of those factors make itextremely difficult for missions’ civilian policecommissioners to transform a disparate group ofofficers into a cohesive and effective force.

122. The Panel therefore calls upon Member States toestablish national pools of serving police officers(augmented, if necessary, by recently retired policeofficers who meet the professional and physicalrequirements) who are administratively and medically

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ready for deployment to United Nations peaceoperations, within the context of the United NationsStandby Arrangements System. The size of the poolwill naturally vary with each country’s size andcapacity. The Civilian Police Unit of DPKO shouldassist Member States in determining the selectioncriteria and training requirements for police officerswithin these pools, by identifying the specialities andexpertise required and issuing common guidelines onthe professional standards to be met. Once deployed ina United Nations mission, civilian police officersshould serve for at least one year to ensure a minimumlevel of continuity.

123. The Panel believes that the cohesion of policecomponents would be further enhanced if police-contributing States were to develop joint trainingexercises, and therefore recommends that MemberStates, where appropriate, enter into new regionaltraining partnerships and strengthen existing ones. ThePanel also calls upon Member States in a position to doso to offer assistance (e.g., training and equipment) tosmaller police-contributing States to maintain therequisite level of preparedness, according to guidelines,standard operating procedures and performancestandards promulgated by the United Nations.

124. The Panel also recommends that Member Statesdesignate a single point of contact within theirgovernmental structures to be responsible forcoordinating and managing the provision of policepersonnel to United Nations peace operations.

125. The Panel believes that the Secretary-Generalshould be given a capability for assembling, on shortnotice, senior civilian police planners and technicalexperts, preferably with prior United Nations missionexperience, to liaise with mission planners atHeadquarters and to then deploy to the field to helpestablish a mission’s civilian police headquarters, asauthorized by the Security Council, in a standbyarrangement that parallels the military headquarters on-call list and its procedures. Upon call-up, members ofthe on-call list would have the same contractual andlegal status as other civilian police in United Nationsoperations. The training and deployment arrangementsfor members of the on-call list also could be the sameas those of its military counterpart. Furthermore, jointtraining and planning between the military and civilianpolice officers on the respective lists would furtherenhance mission cohesion and cooperation acrosscomponents at the start-up of a new operation.

126. Summary of key recommendations on civilianpolice personnel:

(a) Member States are encouraged to eachestablish a national pool of civilian police officersthat would be ready for deployment to UnitedNations peace operations on short notice, within thecontext of the United Nations standby arrangementssystem;

(b) Member States are encouraged to enterinto regional training partnerships for civilianpolice in the respective national pools in order topromote a common level of preparedness inaccordance with guidelines, standard operatingprocedures and performance standards to bepromulgated by the United Nations;

(c) Members States are encouraged todesignate a single point of contact within theirgovernmental structures for the provision of civilianpolice to United Nations peace operations;

(d) The Panel recommends that a revolvingon-call list of about 100 police officers and relatedexperts be created in UNSAS to be available onseven days’ notice with teams trained to create thecivilian police component of a new peacekeepingoperation, train incoming personnel and give thecomponent greater coherence at an early date;

(e) The Panel recommends that parallelarrangements to recommendations (a), (b) and (c)above be established for judicial, penal, humanrights and other relevant specialists, who withspecialist civilian police will make up collegial “ruleof law” teams.

E. Civilian specialists

127. To date, the Secretariat has been unable toidentify, recruit and deploy suitably qualified civilianpersonnel in substantive and support functions either atthe right time or in the numbers required. Currently,about 50 per cent of field positions in substantive areasand up to 40 per cent of the positions in administrativeand logistics areas are vacant, in missions that wereestablished six months to one year ago and remain indesperate need of the requisite specialists. Some ofthose who have been deployed have found themselvesin positions that do not match their previousexperience, such as in the civil administration

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components of the United Nations TransitionalAdministration in East Timor (UNTAET) and UNMIK.Furthermore, the rate of recruitment is nearly matchedby the rate of departure by mission personnel fed upwith the working conditions that they face, includingthe short-staffing itself. High vacancy and turnoverrates foreshadow a disturbing scenario for the start-upand maintenance of the next complex peacekeepingoperation, and hamper the full deployment of currentmissions. Those problems are compounded by severalfactors.

1. Lack of standby systems to respond tounexpected or high-volume surge demands

128. Each new complex task assigned to the newgeneration of peacekeeping operations creates demandsthat the United Nations system is not able to meet onshort notice. This phenomenon first emerged in theearly 1990s, with the establishment of the followingoperations to implement peace accords: the UnitedNations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC),the United Nations Observer Mission in El Salvador(ONUSAL), the United Nations Angola VerificationMission (UNAVEM) and the United Nations Operationin Mozambique (ONUMOZ). The system struggled torecruit experts on short notice in electoral assistance,economic reconstruction and rehabilitation, humanrights monitoring, radio and television production,judicial affairs and institution-building. By mid-decade, the system had created a cadre of individuals,which had acquired on-the-job expertise in these areas,hitherto not present in the system. However, forreasons explained below, many of those individualshave since left the system.

129. The Secretariat was again taken by surprise in1999, when it had to staff missions withresponsibilities for governance in East Timor andKosovo. Few staff within the Secretariat, or withinUnited Nations agencies, funds or programmes possessthe technical expertise and experience required to run amunicipality or national ministry. Neither couldMember States themselves fill the gap immediately,because they, too, had done no advance planning toidentify qualified and available candidates within theirnational structures. Moreover, the understaffedtransitional administration missions themselves tooksome time to even specify precisely what they required.Eventually, a few Member States offered to providecandidates (some at no cost to the United Nations) to

satisfy substantial elements of the demand. However,the Secretariat did not fully avail itself of those offers,partly to avoid the resulting lopsided geographicdistribution in the missions’ staffing. The idea ofindividual Member States taking over entire sectors ofadministration (sectoral responsibility) was alsofloated, apparently too late in the process to iron outthe details. This idea is worth revisiting, at least for theprovision of small teams of civil administrators withspecialized expertise.

130. In order to respond quickly, ensure quality controland satisfy the volume of even foreseeable demands,the Secretariat would require the existence andmaintenance of a roster of civilian candidates. Theroster (which would be distinct from UNSAS) shouldinclude the names of individuals in a variety of fields,who have been actively sought out (on an individualbasis or through partnerships with and/or the assistanceof the members of the United Nations family,governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations), pre-vetted, interviewed,pre-selected, medically cleared and provided with thebasic orientation material applicable to field missionservice in general, and who have indicated theiravailability on short notice.

131. No such roster currently exists. As a result, urgentphone calls have to be made to Member States, UnitedNations departments and agencies and the fieldmissions themselves to identify suitable candidates atthe last minute, and to then expect those candidates tobe in a position to drop everything overnight. Throughthis method, the Secretariat has managed to recruit anddeploy at least 1,500 new staff over the last year, notincluding the managed reassignments of existing staffwithin the United Nations system, but quality controlhas suffered.

132. A central Intranet-based roster should be created,along the lines proposed above, that is accessible toand maintained by the relevant members of ECPS. Theroster should include the names of their own staffwhom ECPS members would agree to release formission service. Some additional resources would berequired to maintain these rosters, but acceptedexternal candidates could be reminded automatically toupdate their own records via the Internet, particularlyas regards availability, and they should be able toaccess on-line briefing and training materials via theInternet, as well. Field missions should be grantedaccess and delegated the authority to recruit candidates

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from the roster, in accordance with guidelines to bepromulgated by the Secretariat for ensuring fairgeographic and gender distribution.

2. Difficulties in attracting and retaining the bestexternal recruits

133. As ad hoc as the recruitment system has been, theUnited Nations has managed to recruit some veryqualified and dedicated individuals for fieldassignments throughout the 1990s. They have managedballots in Cambodia, dodged bullets in Somalia,evacuated just in time from Liberia and came to acceptartillery fire in former Yugoslavia as a feature of theirdaily life. Yet, the United Nations system has not yetfound a contractual mechanism to appropriatelyrecognize and reward their service by offering themsome job security. While it is true that mission recruitsare explicitly told not to harbour false expectationsabout future employment because external recruits arebrought in to fill a “temporary” demand, suchconditions of service do not attract and retain the bestperformers for long. In general, there is a need torethink the historically prevailing view ofpeacekeeping as a temporary aberration rather than acore function of the United Nations.

134. Thus, at least a percentage of the best externalrecruits should be offered longer-term career prospectsbeyond the limited-duration contracts that they arecurrently offered, and some of them should be activelyrecruited for positions in the Secretariat’s complexemergency departments in order to increase the numberof Headquarters staff with field experience. A limitednumber of mission recruits have managed to securepositions at Headquarters, but apparently on an ad hocand individual basis rather than according to aconcerted and transparent strategy.

135. Proposals are currently being formulated toaddress this situation by enabling mission recruits whohave served for four years in the field to be offered“continuing appointments”, whenever possible; unlikecurrent contracts, these would not be restricted to theduration of a specific mission mandate. Suchinitiatives, if adopted, would help to address theproblem for those who joined the field in mid-decadeand remain in the system. They might not, however, gofar enough to attract new recruits, who would generallyhave to take up six-month to one-year assignments at atime, without necessarily knowing if there would be aposition for them once the assignment had been

completed. The thought of having to live in limbo forfour years might be inhibiting for some of the bestcandidates, particularly for those with families, whohave ample alternative employment opportunities(often with more competitive conditions of service).Consideration should therefore be given to offeringcontinuing appointments to those external recruits whohave served with particular distinction for at least twoyears in a peace operation.

3. Shortages in administrative and supportfunctions at the mid- to senior-levels

136. Critical shortfalls in key administrative areas(procurement, finance, budget, personnel) and inlogistics support areas (contracts managers, engineers,information systems analysts, logistics planners)plagued United Nations peace operations throughoutthe 1990s. The unique and specific nature of theOrganization’s administrative rules, regulations andinternal procedures preclude new recruits from takingon these administrative and logistics functions in thedynamic conditions of mission start-up, without asubstantial amount of training. While ad hoc trainingprogrammes for such personnel were initiated in 1995,they have yet to be institutionalized because the mostexperienced individuals, the would-be trainers, couldnot be spared from their full-time line responsibilities.In general, training and the production of user-friendlyguidance documents are the first projects to be setaside when new missions have to be staffed on anurgent basis. Accordingly, the updated version of the1992 field administration handbook still remains indraft form.

4. Penalizing field deployment

137. Headquarters staff who are familiar with therules, regulations and procedures do not readily deployto the field. Staff in both administrative and substantiveareas must volunteer for field duty and their managersmust agree to release them. Heads of departments oftendiscourage, dissuade and/or refuse to release their bestperformers for field assignments because of shortagesof competent staff in their own offices, which they feartemporary replacements cannot resolve. Potentialvolunteers are further discouraged because they knowcolleagues who were passed over for promotionbecause they were “out of sight, out of mind.” Mostfield operations are “non-family assignments” givensecurity considerations, another factor which reduces

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the numbers of volunteers. A number of the field-oriented United Nations agencies, funds andprogrammes (UNHCR, the World Food Programme(WFP), UNICEF, the United Nations Population Fund(UNFPA), UNDP) do have a number of potentially wellqualified candidates for peacekeeping service, but alsoface resource constraints, and the staffing needs oftheir own field operations generally take first priority.

138. The Office of Human Resources Management,supported by a number of interdepartmental taskforces, has proposed a series of progressive reformsthat address some of these problems. They requiremobility within the Secretariat, and aim to encouragerotation between Headquarters and the field byrewarding mission service during promotionconsiderations. They seek to reduce recruitment delaysand grant full recruitment authority to heads ofdepartments. The Panel feels it is essential that theseinitiatives be approved expeditiously.

5. Obsolescence in the Field Service category

139. The Field Service is the only category of staffwithin the United Nations designed specifically forservice in peacekeeping operations (and whoseconditions of service and contracts are designedaccordingly and whose salaries and benefits are paidfor entirely from mission budgets). It has lost much ofits value, however, because the Organization has notdedicated enough resources to career development forthe Field Service Officers. This category wasdeveloped in the 1950s to provide a highly mobilecadre of technical specialists to support in particularthe military contingents of peacekeeping operations. Asthe nature of the operations changed, so too did thefunctions the Field Service Officers were asked toperform. Eventually, some ascended through the ranksby the late 1980s and early 1990s to assume managerialfunctions in the administrative and logisticscomponents of peacekeeping operations.

140. The most experienced and seasoned of the groupare now in limited supply, deployed in currentmissions, and many are at or near retirement. Many ofthose who remain lack the managerial skills or trainingrequired to effectively run the key administrativecomponents of complex peace operations. Others’technical knowledge is dated. Thus, the Field Service’scomposition no longer matches all or many of theadministrative and logistics support needs of the newergeneration of peacekeeping operations. The Panel

therefore encourages the urgent revision of the FieldService’s composition and raison d’être, to bettermatch the present and future demands of fieldoperations, with particular emphasis on mid- to senior-level managers in key administrative and logisticsareas. Staff development and training for this categoryof personnel, on a continual basis, should also betreated as a high priority, and the conditions of serviceshould be revised to attract and retain the bestcandidates.

6. Lack of a comprehensive staffing strategy forpeace operations

141. There is no comprehensive staffing strategy toensure the right mix of civilian personnel in anyoperation. There are talents within the United Nationssystem that must be tapped, gaps to be filled throughexternal recruitment and a range of other options thatfall in between, such as the use of United NationsVolunteers, subcontracted personnel, commercialservices, and nationally-recruited staff. The UnitedNations has turned to all of these sources of personnelthroughout the past decade, but on a case-by-case basisrather than according to a global strategy. Such astrategy is required to ensure cost-effectiveness andefficiency, as well as to promote mission cohesion andstaff morale.

142. This staffing strategy should address the use ofUnited Nations Volunteers in peacekeeping operations,on a priority basis. Since 1992, more than 4,000 UnitedNations Volunteers have served in 19 differentpeacekeeping operations. Approximately 1,500 UnitedNations Volunteers have been assigned to new missionsin East Timor, Kosovo and Sierra Leone in the last 18months alone, in civil administration, electoral affairs,human rights, administrative and logistics supportroles. United Nations Volunteers have historicallyproven to be dedicated and competent in their fields ofwork. The legislative bodies have encouraged greateruse of United Nations Volunteers in peacekeepingoperations based on their exemplary past performance,but using United Nations Volunteers as a form of cheaplabour risks corrupting the programme and can bedamaging to mission morale. Many United NationsVolunteers work alongside colleagues who are makingthree or four times their salary for similar functions.DPKO is currently in discussion with the UnitedNations Volunteers Programme on the conclusion of aglobal memorandum of understanding for the use of

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United Nations Volunteers in peacekeeping operations.It is essential that such a memorandum be part of abroader comprehensive staffing strategy for peaceoperations.

143. This strategy should also include, in particular,detailed proposals for the establishment of a CivilianStandby Arrangements System (CSAS). CSAS shouldcontain a list of personnel within the United Nationssystem who have been pre-selected, medically clearedand committed by their parent offices to join a missionstart-up team on 72 hours’ notice. The relevantmembers of the United Nations family should bedelegated authority and responsibility, for occupationalgroups within their respective expertise, to initiatepartnerships and memoranda of understanding withintergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, forthe provision of personnel to supplement mission start-upteams drawn from within the United Nations system.

144. The fact that responsibility for developing aglobal staffing strategy and civilian standbyarrangements has rested solely within the FieldAdministration and Logistics Division (FALD), actingon its own initiative whenever there are a few momentsto spare, is itself an indication that the Secretariat hasnot dedicated enough attention to this critical issue.The staffing of a mission, from the top down, isperhaps one of the most important building blocks forsuccessful mission execution. This subject shouldtherefore be accorded the highest priority by theSecretariat’s senior management.

145. Summary of key recommendations on civilianspecialists:

(a) The Secretariat should establish a centralInternet/Intranet-based roster of pre-selectedcivilian candidates available to deploy to peaceoperations on short notice. The field missionsshould be granted access to and delegated authorityto recruit candidates from it, in accordance withguidelines on fair geographic and genderdistribution to be promulgated by the Secretariat;

(b) The Field Service category of personnelshould be reformed to mirror the recurrentdemands faced by all peace operations, especially atthe mid- to senior-levels in the administrative andlogistics areas;

(c) Conditions of service for externallyrecruited civilian staff should be revised to enable

the United Nations to attract the most highlyqualified candidates, and to then offer those whohave served with distinction greater careerprospects;

(d) DPKO should formulate a comprehensivestaffing strategy for peace operations, outlining,among other issues, the use of United NationsVolunteers, standby arrangements for the provisionof civilian personnel on 72 hours’ notice to facilitatemission start-up, and the divisions of responsibilityamong the members of the Executive Committee onPeace and Security for implementing that strategy.

F. Public information capacity

146. An effective public information andcommunications capacity in mission areas is anoperational necessity for virtually all United Nationspeace operations. Effective communication helps todispel rumour, to counter disinformation and to securethe cooperation of local populations. It can provideleverage in dealing with leaders of rival groups,enhance security of United Nations personnel and serveas a force multiplier. It is thus essential that everypeace operation formulate public information campaignstrategies, particularly for key aspects of a mission’smandate, and that such strategies and the personnelrequired to implement them be included in the veryfirst elements deployed to help start up a new mission.

147. Field missions need competent spokespeople whoare integrated into the senior management team andproject its daily face to the world. To be effective, thespokesperson must have journalistic experience andinstincts, and knowledge of how both the mission andUnited Nations Headquarters work. He or she mustalso enjoy the confidence of the SRSG and establishgood relationship with other members of the missionleadership. The Secretariat must therefore increase itsefforts to develop and retain a pool of such personnel.

148. United Nations field operations also need to beable to speak effectively to their own people, to keepstaff informed of mission policy and developments andto build links between components and both up anddown the chain of command. New informationtechnology provides effective tools for suchcommunications, and should be included in the start-upkits and equipment reserves at UNLB in Brindisi.

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149. Resources devoted to public information and theassociated personnel and information technologyrequired to get an operation’s message out and buildeffective internal communications links, which nowinfrequently exceed one per cent of a mission’soperating budget, should be increased in accordancewith a mission’s mandate, size and needs.

150. Summary of key recommendation on rapidlydeployable capacity for public information:additional resources should be devoted in missionbudgets to public information and the associatedpersonnel and information technology required toget an operation’s message out and build effectiveinternal communications links.

G. Logistics support, the procurementprocess and expenditure management

151. The depletion of the United Nations reserve ofequipment, long lead-times even for systems contracts,bottlenecks in the procurement process and delays inobtaining cash in hand to conduct procurement in thefield further constrain the rapid deployment andeffective functioning of missions that do actuallymanage to reach authorized staffing levels. Withouteffective logistics support, missions cannot functioneffectively.

152. The lead-times required for the United Nations toprovide field missions with basic equipment andcommercial services required for mission start-up andfull deployment are dictated by the United Nationsprocurement process. That process is governed by theFinancial Regulations and Rules promulgated by theGeneral Assembly and the Secretariat’s interpretationsof those regulations and rules (known as “policies andprocedures” in United Nations parlance). Theregulations, rules, policies and procedures have beentranslated into a roughly eight-step process thatHeadquarters must follow to provide field missionswith the equipment and services it requires, as follows:

1. Identify the requirements and raise arequisition.

2. Certify that finances are available toprocure the item.

3. Initiate an invitation to bid (ITB) or requestfor proposal (RFP).

4. Evaluate tenders.

5. Present cases to the HeadquartersCommittee on Contracts (HCC).

6. Award a contract and place an order forproduction.

7. Await production of the item.

8. Deliver the item to the mission.

153. Most governmental organizations and commercialcompanies follow similar processes, though not all ofthem take as long as that of the United Nations. Forexample, this entire process in the United Nations cantake 20 weeks in the case of office furniture, 17 to21 weeks for generators, 23 to 27 weeks forprefabricated buildings, 27 weeks for heavy vehiclesand 17 to 21 weeks for communications equipment.Naturally, none of these lead-times enable full missiondeployment within the timelines suggested if themajority of the processes are commencing only after anoperation has been established.

154. The United Nations launched the “start-up kit”concept during the boom in peacekeeping operations inthe mid-1990s to partially address this problem. Thestart-up kits contain the basic equipment required toestablish and sustain a 100-person missionheadquarters for the first 100 days of deployment, pre-purchased, packaged and waiting and ready to deployat a moment’s notice at Brindisi. Assessedcontributions from the mission to which the kits aredeployed are then used to reconstitute new start-upkits, and once liquidated a mission’s non-disposableand durable equipment is returned to Brindisi and heldin reserve, in addition to the start-up kits.

155. However, the wear and tear on light vehicles andother items in post-war environments may sometimesrender the shipping and servicing costs more expensivethan selling off the item or cannibalizing it for partsand then purchasing a new item altogether. Thus, theUnited Nations has moved towards auctioning suchitems in situ more frequently, although the Secretariatis not authorized to use the funds acquired through thisprocess to purchase new equipment but must return itto Member States. Consideration should be given toenabling the Secretariat to use the funds acquiredthrough these means to purchase new equipment to beheld in reserve at Brindisi. Furthermore, considerationshould also be given to a general authorization for fieldmissions to donate, in consultation with the UnitedNations resident coordinator, at least a percentage of

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such equipment to reputable local non-governmentalorganizations as a means of assisting the developmentof nascent civil society.

156. Nonetheless, the existence of these start-up kitsand reserves of equipment appears to have greatlyfacilitated the rapid deployment of the smalleroperations mounted in the mid-to-late 1990s. However,the establishment and expansion of new missions hasnow outpaced the closure of existing operations, so thatUNLB has been virtually depleted of the long lead-timeitems required for full mission deployment. Unless oneof the large operations currently in place closes downtoday and its equipment is all shipped to UNLB ingood condition, the United Nations will not have inhand the equipment required to support the start-up andrapid full deployment of a large mission in the nearfuture.

157. There are, of course, limits to how muchequipment the United Nations can and should keep inreserve at UNLB or elsewhere. Mechanical equipmentin storage needs to be maintained, which can be anexpensive proposition, and if not addressed properlycan result in missions receiving long awaited items thatare inoperable. Furthermore, the commercial and publicsectors at the national level have moved increasinglytowards “just-in-time” inventory and/or “just-in-timedelivery” because of the high opportunity costs ofkeeping funds tied up in equipment that may not bedeployed for some time. Furthermore, the current paceof technological advancements renders certain items,such as communications equipment and informationsystems hardware, obsolete within a matter of months,let alone years.

158. The United Nations has accordingly also movedin that direction over the past few years, and hasconcluded some 20 standing commercial systemscontracts for the provision of common equipment forpeace operations, particularly those required formission start-up and expansion. Under the systemscontracts, the United Nations has been able to cut downlead-times considerably by selecting the vendors aheadof time, and keeping them on standby for productionrequests. Nevertheless, the production of light vehiclesunder the current systems contract takes 14 weeks andrequires an additional four weeks for delivery.

159. The General Assembly has taken a number ofsteps to address this lead-time issue. The establishmentof the Peacekeeping Reserve Fund, which when fully

capitalized amounts to $150 million, provided astanding pool of money from which to draw quickly.The Secretary-General can seek the approval of theAdvisory Committee on Administrative and BudgetaryQuestions (ACABQ) to draw up to $50 million fromthe Fund to facilitate the start-up of a new mission orfor unforeseen expansion of an existing one. The Fundis then replenished from the mission budgets once ithas been approved or increased. For commitmentrequests in excess of $50 million, the GeneralAssembly’s approval is required.

160. In exceptional cases, the General Assembly, onthe advice of ACABQ, has granted the Secretary-General authority to commit up to $200 million inspending to facilitate the start-up of larger missions(UNTAET, UNMIK and MONUC), pendingsubmission of the necessary detailed budget proposals,which can take months of preparation. These are allwelcome developments and are indicative of theMember States’ support for enhancing theOrganization’s rapid deployment capacities.

161. At the same time, all of these developments areonly applicable after a Security Council resolution hasbeen adopted authorizing the establishment of amission or its advance elements. Unless some of thesemeasures are applied well in advance of the desireddate of mission deployment or are modified to help andmaintain a minimum reserve of equipment requiringlong lead-times to procure, the suggested targets forrapid and effective deployment cannot be met.

162. The Secretariat should thus formulate a globallogistics support strategy to enable rapid and effectivemission deployment within the deployment timelinesproposed. That strategy should be formulated based ona cost-benefit analysis of the appropriate level of longlead-time items that should be kept in reserve and thosebest acquired through standing contracts, factoring inthe cost of compressed delivery times, as required, tosupport such a strategy. The substantive elements of thepeace and security departments would need to givelogistics planners an estimate of the number and typesof operations that might need to be established over12 to 18 months. The Secretary-General should submitperiodically to the General Assembly, for its reviewand approval, a detailed proposal for implementing thatstrategy, which could entail considerable financialimplications.

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163. In the interim, the General Assembly shouldauthorize and approve a one-time expenditure for thecreation of three new start-up kits at Brindisi (for atotal of five), which would then automatically bereplenished from the budgets of the missions that drewupon the kits.

164. The Secretary-General should be given authorityto draw up to $50 million from the PeacekeepingReserve Fund, prior to the adoption of a SecurityCouncil resolution authorizing a mission’sestablishment but with the approval of ACABQ, tofacilitate the rapid and effective deployment ofoperations within the proposed timelines. The Fundshould be automatically replenished from assessedcontributions to the missions that used it. TheSecretary-General should request that the GeneralAssembly consider augmenting the size of the Fund,should he determine that it had been depleted due tothe establishment of a number of missions in rapidsuccession.

165. Well beyond mission start-up, the field missionsoften wait for months to receive items that they need,particularly when initial planning assumptions prove tobe inaccurate or mission requirements change inresponse to new developments. Even if such items areavailable locally, there are several constraints on localprocurement. First, field missions have limitedflexibility and authority, for example, to quicklytransfer savings from one line item in a budget toanother to meet unforeseen demands. Second, missionsare generally delegated procurement authority for nomore than $200,000 per purchase order. Purchasesabove that amount must be referred to Headquartersand its eight-step decision process (see para. 152above).

166. The Panel supports measures that reduceHeadquarters micro-management of the field missionsand provide them with the authority and flexibilityrequired to maintain mission credibility andeffectiveness, while at the same time holding themaccountable. Where Headquarters’ involvement addsreal value, however, as with respect to standingcontracts, Headquarters should retain procurementresponsibility.

167. Statistics from the Procurement Division indicatethat of the 184 purchase orders raised by Headquartersin 1999 in support of peacekeeping operations, forvalues of goods and services between US$ 200,000 and

US$ 500,000, 93 per cent related to aircraft andshipping services, motor vehicles and computers,which were either handled through internationaltenders or are currently covered under systemscontracts. Provided that systems contracts are activatedquickly and result in the timely provision of goods andservices, it appears that the Headquarters’ involvementin those instances makes good sense. The systemscontracts and international tenders presumably enablebulk purchases of items and services more cheaply thanwould be possible locally, and in many instancesinvolve goods and services not available in the missionareas at all.

168. However, it is not entirely clear what real valueHeadquarters involvement adds to the procurementprocess for those goods and services that are notcovered under systems contracts or standingcommercial services contracts and are more readilyavailable locally at cheaper prices. In such instances, itwould make sense to delegate the authority to the fieldto procure those items, and to monitor the process andits financial controls through the audit mechanism.Accordingly, the Secretariat should assign priority tobuilding capacity in the field to assume a higher levelof procurement authority as quickly as possible (e.g.,through recruitment and training of the appropriatefield personnel and the production of user-friendlyguidance documents) for all goods and services that areavailable locally and not covered under systemscontracts or standing commercial services contracts (upto US$ 1 million, depending on mission size andneeds).

169. Summary of key recommendations on logisticssupport and expenditure management:

(a) The Secretariat should prepare a globallogistics support strategy to enable rapid andeffective mission deployment within the timelinesproposed and corresponding to planningassumptions established by the substantive officesof the Department of Peacekeeping Operations;

(b) The General Assembly should authorizeand approve a one-time expenditure to maintain atleast five mission start-up kits in Brindisi, whichshould include rapidly deployable communicationsequipment. The start-up kits should then beroutinely replenished with funding from theassessed contributions to the operations that drewon them;

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(c) The Secretary-General should be givenauthority to draw up to US$ 50 million from thePeacekeeping Reserve Fund once it became clearthat an operation was likely to be established, withthe approval of ACABQ but prior to the adoption ofa Security Council resolution;

(d) The Secretariat should undertake areview of the entire procurement policies andprocedures (with proposals to the General Assemblyfor amendments to the Financial Rules andRegulations, as required), to facilitate in particularthe rapid and full deployment of an operationwithin the proposed timelines;

(e) The Secretariat should conduct a reviewof the policies and procedures governing themanagement of financial resources in the fieldmissions with a view to providing field missionswith much greater flexibility in the management oftheir budgets;

(f) The Secretariat should increase the levelof procurement authority delegated to the fieldmissions (from $200,000 to as high as $1 million,depending on mission size and needs) for all goodsand services that are available locally and are notcovered under systems contracts or standingcommercial services contracts.

IV. Headquarters resources andstructure for planning andsupporting peacekeepingoperations

170. Creating effective Headquarters support capacityfor peace operations means addressing the three issuesof quantity, structure and quality, that is, the number ofstaff needed to get the job done; the organizationalstructures and procedures that facilitate effectivesupport; and quality people and methods of workwithin those structures. In the present section, thePanel examines and makes recommendations onprimarily the first two issues; in section VI below, itaddresses the issue of personnel quality andorganizational culture.

171. The Panel sees a clear need for increasedresources in support of peacekeeping operations. Thereis particular need for increased resources in DPKO, theprimary department responsible for the planning and

support of the United Nations’ most complex and high-profile field operations.

A. Staffing-levels and funding forHeadquarters support forpeacekeeping operations

172. Expenditures for Headquarters staffing andrelated costs to plan and support all peacekeepingoperations in the field can be considered the UnitedNations direct, non-field support costs forpeacekeeping operations. They have not exceeded 6 percent of the total cost of peacekeeping operations in thelast half decade (see table 4.1). They are currentlycloser to three per cent and will fall below two per centin the current peacekeeping budget year, based onexisting plans for expansion of some missions, such asMONUC in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, thefull deployment of others, such as UNAMSIL in SierraLeone, and the establishment of a new operation inEritrea and Ethiopia. A management analyst familiarwith the operational requirements of largeorganizations, public or private, that operate substantialfield-deployed elements might well conclude that anorganization trying to run a field-oriented enterprise ontwo per cent central support costs was undersupportingits field people and very likely burning out its supportstructures in the process.

173. Table 4.1 lists the total budgets for peacekeepingoperations from mid-1996 through mid-2001(peacekeeping budget cycles run from July to June,offset six months from the United Nations regularbudget cycle). It also lists total Headquarters costs insupport of peacekeeping, whether inside or outside ofDPKO, and whether funded from the regular budget orthe Support Account for Peacekeeping Operations (theregular budget covers two years and its costs areapportioned among Member States according to theregular scale of assessment; the Support Accountcovers one year — the intent being that Secretariatstaffing levels should ebb and flow with the level offield operations — and its costs are apportionedaccording to the peacekeeping scale of assessment).

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Table 4.1Ratio of total Headquarters support costs to totalpeacekeeping operations budgets, 1996-2001(Millions of United States dollars)

July 1996-June 1997

July 1997-June 1998

July 1998-June 1999

July 1999-June 2000

July 2000-June 2001a

Peacekeepingbudgets 1 260 911.7 812.9 1 417 2 582b

RelatedHeadquarterssupport costsc 49.2 52.8 41.0 41.7 50.2

Headquarters:field cost ratio 3.90% 5.79% 5.05% 2.95% 1.94%

a Based on financing reports of the Secretary-General;excluding missions completed by 30 June 2000; includingrough estimate for full deployment of MONUC, for whicha budget has not yet been prepared.

b Estimated.c Figures obtained from the Financial Controller of the

United Nations, including all posts in the Secretariat(primarily in DPKO) funded through the regular bienniumbudget and the Support Account; figures also factor inwhat the costs would have been for in-kind contributions or“gratis personnel” had they been fully funded.

174. The Support Account funds 85 per cent of theDPKO budget, or about $40 million annually. Another$6 million for DPKO comes from the regular bienniumbudget. This $46 million combined largely funds thesalaries and associated costs of DPKO’s 231 civilian,military and police Professionals and 173 GeneralService staff (but does not include the Mine ActionService, which is funded through voluntarycontributions). The Support Account also funds postsin other parts of the Secretariat engaged inpeacekeeping support, such as the PeacekeepingFinancing Division and parts of the ProcurementDivision in the Department of Management, the Officeof Legal Affairs and DPI.

175. Until mid-decade, the Support Account wascalculated as 8.5 per cent of the total civilian staff costsof peacekeeping operations, but it did not take intoconsideration the costs of supporting civilian policepersonnel and United Nations Volunteers, or the costsof supporting private contractors or military troops.The fixed-percentage approach was replaced by theannual justification of every post funded by theSupport Account. DPKO staffing levels grew little

under the new system, however, partly because theSecretariat seems to have tailored its submissions towhat it thought the political market would bear.

176. Clearly, DPKO and the other Secretariat officessupporting peacekeeping should expand and contract tosome degree in relation to the level of activity in thefield, but to require DPKO to rejustify, every year,seven out of eight posts in the Department is to treat itas though it were a temporary creation andpeacekeeping a temporary responsibility of theOrganization. Fifty-two years of operations wouldargue otherwise and recent history would argue furtherthat continuing preparedness is essential, even duringdownturns in field activity, because events are onlymarginally predictable and staff capacity andexperience, once lost, can take a long time to rebuild,as DPKO has painfully learned in the past two years.

177. Because the Support Account funds virtually allof DPKO on a year-by-year basis, that Department andthe other offices funded by the Support Account haveno predictable baseline level of funding and postsagainst which they can recruit and retain staff.Personnel brought in from the field on SupportAccount-funded posts do not know if those posts willexist for them one year later. Given current workingconditions and the career uncertainty that SupportAccount funding entails, it is impressive that DPKOhas managed to hold together at all.

178. Member States and the Secretariat have longrecognized the need to define a baselinestaffing/funding level and a separate mechanism toenable growth and retrenchment in DPKO in responseto changing needs. However, without a review ofDPKO staffing needs based on some objectivemanagement and productivity criteria, an appropriatebaseline is difficult to define. While it is not in aposition to conduct such a methodical managementreview of DPKO, the Panel believes that such a reviewshould be conducted. In the meantime, the Panelbelieves that certain current staff shortages are plainlyobvious and merit highlighting.

179. The Military and Civilian Police Division inDPKO, headed by the United Nations Military Adviser,has an authorized strength of 32 military officers andnine civilian police officers. The Civilian Police Unithas been assigned to support all aspects of UnitedNations international police operations, from doctrinaldevelopment through selection and deployment of

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officers into field operations. It can, at present, do littlemore than identify personnel, attempt to pre-screenthem with visiting selection assistance teams (an effortthat occupies roughly half of the staff) and then see thatthey get to the field. Moreover, there is no unit withinDPKO (or any other part of the United Nations system)that is responsible for planning and supporting the ruleof law elements of an operation that in turn supporteffective police work, whether advisory or executive.

180. Eleven officers in the Military Adviser’s officesupport the identification and rotation of military unitsfor all peacekeeping operations, and provide militaryadvice to the political officers in DPKO. DPKO’smilitary officers are also supposed to find time to “trainthe trainers” at the Member State level, to draftguidelines, manuals and other briefing material, and towork with FALD to identify the logistics and otheroperational requirements of the military and policecomponents of field missions. However, under existingstaffing levels, the Training Unit consists of only fivemilitary officers in total. Ten officers in the MilitaryPlanning Service are the principal operational-levelmilitary mission planners within DPKO; six more postshave been authorized but have not yet all been filled.These 16 planning officers combined represent the fullcomplement of military staff available to determineforce requirements for mission start-up and expansion,participate in technical surveys and assess thepreparedness of potential troop contributors. Of the 10military planners originally authorized, one wasassigned to draft the rules of engagement and directivesto force commanders for all operations. Only oneofficer is available, part time, to manage the UNSASdatabase.

181. Table 4.2 contrasts the deployed strength ofmilitary and police contingents with the authorizedstrength of their respective Headquarters support staffs.No national Government would send 27,000 troops intothe field with just 32 officers back home to providethem with substantive and operational militaryguidance. No police organization would deploy 8,000police officers with only nine headquarters staff toprovide them with substantive and operational policingsupport.

Table 4.2Ratio of military and civilian police staff atHeadquarters to military and civilian policepersonnel in the fielda

Military personnel Civilian police

Peacekeepingoperations 27 365 8 641

Headquarters 32 9

Headquarters: fieldratio 0.1% 0.1%

a Authorized military strength as of 15 June 2000 andcivilian police as of 1 August 2000.

182. The Office of Operations in DPKO, in which thepolitical Desk Officers or substantive focal points forparticular peacekeeping operations reside, is anotherarea that seems considerably understaffed. It currentlyhas 15 Professionals serving as the focal points for 14current and two potential new peace operations, or lessthan one officer per mission on average. While oneofficer may be able to handle the needs of one or eventwo smaller missions, this seems untenable in the caseof the larger missions, such as UNTAET in East Timor,UNMIK in Kosovo, UNAMSIL in Sierra Leone andMONUC in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.Similar circumstances apply to the logistics andpersonnel officers in DPKO’s Field Administration andLogistics Division, and to related support personnel inthe Department of Management, the Office of LegalAffairs, the Department of Public Information andother offices which support their work. Table 4.3depicts the total number of staff in DPKO andelsewhere in the Secretariat dedicated, full-time, tosupporting the larger missions, along with their annualmission budgets and authorized staffing levels.

183. The general shortage of staff means that in manyinstances key personnel have no back-up, no way tocover more than one shift in a day when a crisis occurssix to 12 time zones away except by covering twoshifts themselves, and no way to take a vacation, getsick or visit the mission without leaving their

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Table 4.3Total staff assigned on a full-time basis to support complex peacekeeping operations established in 1999

UNMIK(Kosovo)

UNAMSIL(Sierra Leone)

UNTAET(East Timor)

MONUC(Democratic Republic of theCongo)

Budget (estimated)July 2000-June 2001

$410 million $465 million $540 million $535 million

Current authorizedstrength of keycomponents

4 718 police1 000-plus international civilians

13 000 military 8 950 military1 640 police1 185 international civilians

5 537 military500 military observers

Professional staff atHeadquarters assignedfull-time to support theoperation

Total Headquarterssupport staff

1 political officer2 civilian police1 logistics coord.1 civilian recruitment specialist1 finance specialist

_______6

1 political officer2 military1 logistics coord.1 finance specialist

_______5

1 political officer2 military1 civilian police1 logistics coord.1 civilian recruitment specialist1 finance specialist_______7

1 political officer3 military1 civilian police1 logistics coord.1 civilian recruitment specialist1 finance specialist_______8

backstopping duties largely uncovered. In the currentarrangements, compromises among competingdemands are inevitable and support for the field maysuffer as a result. In New York, Headquarters-relatedtasks, such as reporting obligations to the legislativebodies, tend to get priority because Member States’representatives press for action, often in person. Thefield, by contrast, is represented in New York by an e-mail, a cable or the jotted notes of a phoneconversation. Thus, in the war for a desk officer’s time,field operations often lose out and are left to solveproblems on their own. Yet they should be accordedfirst priority. People in the field face difficultcircumstances, sometimes life-threatening. Theydeserve better, as do the staff at Headquarters who wishto support them more effectively.

184. Although there appears to be some duplication inthe functions performed by desk officers in DPKO andtheir counterparts in the regional divisions of DPA,closer examination suggests otherwise. The UNMIKdesk officer’s counterpart in DPA, for example, followsdevelopments in all of Southeastern Europe and thecounterpart in OCHA covers all of the Balkans plusparts of the Commonwealth of Independent States.While it is essential that the officers in DPA andOCHA be given the opportunity to contribute whatthey can, their efforts combined yield less than one

additional full-time-equivalent officer to supportUNMIK.

185. The three Regional Directors in the Office ofOperations should be visiting the missions regularlyand engaging in a constant policy dialogue with theSRSGs and heads of components on the obstacles thatHeadquarters could help them overcome. Instead, theyare drawn into the processes that occupy their deskofficers’ time because the latter need the back-up.

186. These competing demands are even morepronounced for the Under-Secretary-General andAssistant Secretary-General for PeacekeepingOperations. The Under-Secretary-General andAssistant Secretary-General provide advice to theSecretary-General, liaise with Member Statedelegations and capitals, and one or the other vetsevery report on peacekeeping operations (40 in the firsthalf of 2000) submitted to the Secretary-General for hisapproval and signature, prior to submission to thelegislative bodies. Since January 2000, the two havebriefed the Council in person over 50 times, in sessionslasting up to three hours and requiring several hours ofstaff preparation in the field and at Headquarters.Coordination meetings take further time away fromsubstantive dialogue with the field missions, from fieldvisits, from reflection on ways to improve the UnitedNations conduct of peacekeeping and from attentivemanagement.

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187. The staff shortages faced by the substantive sideof DPKO may be exceeded by those in theadministrative and logistics support areas, particularlyin FALD. At this juncture, FALD provides support notonly to peacekeeping operations but also to other fieldoffices, such as the Office of the United NationsSpecial Coordinator in the Occupied Territories(UNSCO) in Gaza, the United Nations VerificationMission in Guatemala (MINUGUA) and a dozen othersmall offices, not to mention continuing involvement inmanaging and reconciling the liquidation of terminatedmissions. All of FALD adds approximately 1.25 percent to the total cost of peacekeeping and other fieldoperations. If the United Nations were to subcontractthe administrative and logistics support functionsperformed by FALD, the Panel is convinced that itwould be hard pressed to find a commercial companyto take on the equivalent task for the equivalent fee.

188. A few examples will illustrate FALD’spronounced staff shortages: the Staffing Section inFALD’s Personnel Management and Support Service(PMSS), which handles recruitment and travel for allcivilian personnel as well as travel for civilian policeand military observers, has just 10 professionalrecruitment officers, four of whom have been assignedto review and acknowledge the 150 unsolicitedemployment applications that the office now receivesevery day. The other six officers handle the actualselection process: one full-time and one half-time forKosovo, one full-time and one half-time for EastTimor, and three to cover all other field missionscombined. Three recruitment officers are trying toidentify suitable candidates to staff two civiladministration missions that need hundreds ofexperienced administrators across a multitude of fieldsand disciplines. Nine to 12 months after they got underway, neither UNMIK nor UNTAET is fully deployed.

189. The Member States must give the Secretary-General some flexibility and the financial resources tobring in the staff he needs to ensure that the credibilityof the Organization is not tarnished by its failure torespond to emergencies as a professional organizationshould. The Secretary-General must be given theresources to increase the capacity of the Secretariat toreact immediately to unforeseen demands.

190. The responsibility for providing the people in thefield the goods and services they need to do their jobsfalls primarily on FALD’s Logistics andCommunications Service (LCS). The job description of

one of the 14 logistics coordinators in LCS might helpto illustrate the workload that the entire Servicecurrently endures. This individual is the lead logisticsplanner for the expansion of both the mission in theDemocratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) and for theexpansion of the United Nations Interim Force inLebanon (UNIFIL) in Lebanon. The same individual isalso responsible for drafting the logistics policies andprocedures for the critical United Nations LogisticsBase in Brindisi and for coordinating the preparation ofthe entire Service’s annual budget submissions.

191. Based on this cursory review alone and bearing inmind that the total support cost for DPKO and relatedHeadquarters peacekeeping support offices does noteven exceed $50 million per annum, the Panel isconvinced that additional resources for that Departmentand the others which support it would be an essentialinvestment to ensure that the over $2 billion theMember States will spend on peacekeeping operationsin 2001 will be well spent. The Panel thereforerecommends a substantial increase in resources for thispurpose, and urge the Secretary-General to submit aproposal to the General Assembly outlining theOrganization’s requirements in full.

192. The Panel also believes that peacekeeping shouldcease to be treated as a temporary requirement andDPKO a temporary organizational structure. It requiresa consistent and predictable baseline of funding to domore than keep existing missions afloat. It should haveresources to plan for potential contingencies sixmonths to a year down the road; to develop managerialtools to help missions perform better in the future; tostudy the potential impact of modern technology ondifferent aspects of peacekeeping; to implement thelessons learned from previous operations; and toimplement recommendations contained in theevaluation reports of the Office of Internal OversightServices over the past five years. Staff should be giventhe opportunity to design and conduct trainingprogrammes for newly recruited staff at Headquartersand in the field. They should finish the guidelines andhandbooks that could help new mission personnel dotheir jobs more professionally and in accordance withUnited Nations rules, regulations and procedures, butthat now sit half finished in a dozen offices all aroundDPKO, because their authors are busy meeting otherneeds.

193. The Panel therefore recommends thatHeadquarters support for peacekeeping be treated as a

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core activity of the United Nations, and as such that themajority of its resource requirements be fundedthrough the mechanism of the regular biennialprogramme budget of the Organization. Pending thepreparation of the next regular budget, it recommendsthat the Secretary-General approach the GeneralAssembly as soon as possible with a request for anemergency supplemental increase to the last SupportAccount submission.

194. The specific allocation of resources should bedetermined according to a professional and objectivereview of requirements, but gross levels should reflecthistorical experience of peacekeeping. One approachwould be to calculate the regular budget baseline forHeadquarters support of peacekeeping as a percentageof the average cost of peacekeeping over the precedingfive years. The resulting baseline budget would reflectthe expected level of activity for which the Secretariatshould be prepared. Based on the figures provided bythe Controller (see table 4.1), the average for the lastfive years (including the current budget year) is $1.4billion. Pegging the baseline at five per cent of theaverage cost would yield, for example, a baselinebudget of $70 million, roughly $20 million more thanthe current annual Headquarters support budget forpeacekeeping.

195. To fund above-average or “surge” activity levels,consideration should be given to a simple percentagecharge against missions whose budgets carrypeacekeeping operations spending above the baselinelevel. For example, the roughly $2.6 billion inpeacekeeping activity estimated for the current budgetyear exceeds the $1.4 billion hypothetical baseline by$1.2 billion. A one per cent surcharge on that $1.2billion would yield an additional $12 million to enableHeadquarters to deal effectively with that increase. Atwo per cent surcharge would yield $24 million.

196. Such a direct method of providing for surgecapacity should replace the current, annual, post-by-post justification required for the Support Accountsubmissions. The Secretary-General should be giventhe flexibility to determine how such funds should bestbe utilized to meet a surge in activity, and emergencyrecruitment measures should apply in such instances sothat temporary posts associated with surgerequirements could be filled immediately.

197. Summary of key recommendations on fundingheadquarters support for peacekeeping operations:

(a) The Panel recommends a substantialincrease in resources for Headquarters support ofpeacekeeping operations, and urges the Secretary-General to submit a proposal to the GeneralAssembly outlining his requirements in full;

(b) Headquarters support for peacekeepingshould be treated as a core activity of the UnitedNations, and as such the majority of its resourcerequirements for that purpose should be fundedthrough the mechanism of the regular bienniumprogramme budget of the Organization;

(c) Pending the preparation of the nextregular budget submission, the Panel recommendsthat the Secretary-General approach the GeneralAssembly with a request for an emergencysupplemental increase to the Support Account toallow immediate recruitment of additionalpersonnel, particularly in DPKO.

B. Need and proposal for theestablishment of Integrated MissionTask Forces

198. There is currently no integrated planning orsupport cell in DPKO in which those responsible forpolitical analysis, military operations, civilian police,electoral assistance, human rights, development,humanitarian assistance, refugees and displacedpersons, public information, logistics, finance andpersonnel recruitment, among others, are represented.On the contrary, as described above, DPKO has nomore than a handful of officers dedicated full-time toplanning and supporting even the large complexoperations, such as those in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL),Kosovo (UNMIK) and East Timor (UNTAET). In thecase of a political peace mission or peace-buildingoffice, these functions are discharged within DPA, withequally limited human resources.

199. DPKO’s Office of Operations is responsible forpulling together an overall concept of operations fornew peacekeeping missions. In this regard, it bears aheavy dual burden for political analysis and for internalcoordination with the other elements of DPKO that areresponsible for military and civilian police matters,logistics, finance and personnel. But each of theseother elements has a separate organizational reportingchain, and many of them, in fact, are physicallyscattered across several different buildings. Moreover,

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DPA, UNDP, OCHA, UNHCR, OHCHR, DPI, andseveral other departments, agencies, funds andprogrammes have an increasingly important role toplay in planning for any future operation, especiallycomplex operations, and need to be formally includedin the planning process.

200. Collaboration across divisions, departments andagencies does occur, but relies too heavily on personalnetworks and ad hoc support. There are task forcesconvened for planning major peacekeeping operations,pulling together various parts of the system, but theyfunction more as sounding boards than executivebodies. Moreover, current task forces tend to meetinfrequently or even disperse once an operation hasbegun to deploy, and well before it has fully deployed.

201. Reversing the perspective, once an operation hasbeen deployed, SRSGs in the field have overallcoordinating authority for United Nations activities intheir mission area but have no single working-levelfocal point at Headquarters that can address all of theirconcerns quickly. For example, the desk officer orhis/her regional director in DPKO fields politicalquestions for peacekeeping operations but usuallycannot directly respond to queries about military,police, humanitarian, human rights, electoral, legal orother elements of an operation, and they do notnecessarily have a ready counterpart in each of thoseareas. A mission impatient for answers will eventuallyfind the right primary contacts themselves and may doso in dozens of instances, building its own networkswith different parts of the Secretariat and relevantagencies.

202. The missions should not feel the need to buildtheir own contact networks. They should know exactlywho to turn to for the answers and support that theyneed, especially in the critical early months when amission is working towards full deployment and copingwith daily crises. Moreover, they should be able tocontact just one place for those answers, an entity thatincludes all of the backstopping people and expertisefor the mission, drawn from an array of Headquarterselements that mirrors the functions of the missionitself. The Panel would call that entity an IntegratedMission Task Force (IMTF).

203. This concept builds upon but considerablyextends the cooperative measures contained in theguidelines for implementing the “lead” departmentconcept that DPKO and DPA agreed to in June 2000, in

a joint departmental meeting chaired by the Secretary-General. The Panel would recommend, for example,that DPKO and DPA jointly determine the leader ofeach new Task Force but not necessarily limit theirchoice to the current staff of either Department. Theremay be occasions when the existing workloads of theregional directors or political officers in eitherdepartment preclude them from taking on the role full-time. In those instances, it might be best to bring insomeone from the field for this purpose. Suchflexibility, including the flexibility to assign the task tothe most qualified person for the job, would require theapproval of funding mechanisms to respond to surgedemands, as recommended above.

204. ECPS or a designated subgroup thereof shouldcollectively determine the general composition of anIMTF, which the Panel envisages forming quite earlyin a process of conflict prevention, peacemaking,prospective peacekeeping or prospective deployment ofa peace-building support office. That is, the notion ofintegrated, one-stop support for United Nations peace-and-security field activities should extend across thewhole range of peace operations, with the size,substantive composition, meeting venue and leadershipmatching the needs of the operation.

205. Leadership and the lead department concept haveposed some problems in the past when the principalfocus of United Nations presence on the ground haschanged from political to peacekeeping or vice versa,causing not only a shift in the field’s primaryHeadquarters contact but a shift in the wholeHeadquarters supporting cast. As the Panel sees theIMTF working, the supporting cast would remainsubstantially the same during and after such transitions,with additions or subtractions as the nature of theoperation changed but with no changes in core TaskForce personnel for those functions that bridge thetransition. IMTF leadership would pass from onemember of the group to another (e.g., from a DPKOregional director or political officer to his or her DPAcounterpart).

206. Size and composition would match the nature andthe phase of the field activity being supported. Crisis-related preventive action would require well informedpolitical support that would keep a United Nationsenvoy apprised of political evolution within the regionand other factors key to the success of his or her effort.Peacemakers working to end a conflict would need toknow more about peacekeeping and peace-building

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options, so that their potential and their limitations areboth reflected in any peace accord that would involveUnited Nations implementation. Adviser-observersfrom the Secretariat working with the peacemakerwould be affiliated with the IMTF that supports thenegotiations, and keep it posted on progress. The IMTFleader could, in turn, serve as the peacemaker’s routinecontact point at Headquarters, with rapid access tohigher echelons of the Secretariat for answers tosensitive political queries.

207. An IMTF of the sort just described could be a“virtual” body, meeting periodically but not physicallyco-located, its members operating from their workdayoffices and tied together by modern informationtechnology. To support their work, each should feed aswell as have access to the data and analyses createdand placed on the United Nations Intranet by EISAS,the ECPS Information and Strategic AnalysisSecretariat proposed in paragraphs 65 to 75 above.

208. IMTFs created to plan potential peace operationscould also begin as virtual bodies. As an operationseemed more likely to go forward, the Task Forceshould assume physical form, with all of its membersco-located in one space, prepared to work together as ateam on a continuing basis for as long as needed tobring a new mission to full deployment. That periodmay be up to six months, assuming that the rapiddeployment reforms recommended in paragraphs 84-169 above have been implemented.

209. Task Force members should be formally secondedto IMTF for such duration by their home division,department, agency, fund or programme. That is, anIMTF should be much more than a coordinatingcommittee or task force of the type now set up atHeadquarters. It should be a temporary but coherentstaff created for a specific purpose, able to be increasedor decreased in size or composition in response tomission needs.

210. Each Task Force member should be authorized toserve not only as a liaison between the Task Force andhis or her home base but as its key working-leveldecision maker for the mission in question. The leaderof the IMTF — reporting to the Assistant Secretary-General for Operations of DPKO in the case ofpeacekeeping operations, and the relevant AssistantSecretary-General of DPA in the case of peacemakingefforts, peace-building support offices and specialpolitical missions — should in turn have line authority

over his or her Task Force members for the period oftheir secondment, and should serve as the first level ofcontact for the peace operations for all aspects of theirwork. Matters related to long-term policy and strategyshould be dealt with at the Assistant Secretary-General/Under-Secretary-General level in ECPS,supported by EISAS.

211. For the United Nations system to be prepared tocontribute staff to an IMTF, responsibility centres foreach major substantive component of peace operationsneed to be established. Departments and agencies needto agree in advance on procedures for secondment andon their support for the IMTF concept, in writing ifnecessary.

212. The Panel is not in a position to suggest “lead”offices for each potential component of a peaceoperation but believes that ECPS should think throughthis issue collectively and assign one of its membersresponsibility for maintaining a level of preparednessfor each potential component of a peace operationother than the military, police and judicial, andlogistics/administration areas, which should remainDPKO’s responsibility. The designated lead agencyshould be responsible for devising generic concepts ofoperations, job descriptions, staffing and equipmentrequirements, critical path/deployment timetables,standard databases, civilian standby arrangements androsters of other potential candidates for thatcomponent, as well as for participation in the IMTFs.

213. IMTFs offer a flexible approach to dealing withtime-critical, resource-intensive but ultimatelytemporary requirements to support mission planning,start-up and initial sustainment. The concept borrowsheavily from the notion of “matrix management”, usedextensively by large organizations that need to be ableto assign the necessary talent to specific projectswithout reorganizing themselves every time a projectarises. Used by such diverse entities as the RANDCorporation and the World Bank, it gives each staffmember a permanent “home” or “parent” departmentbut allows — indeed, expects — staff to function insupport of projects as the need arises. A matrixmanagement approach to Headquarters planning andsupport of peace operations would allow departments,agencies, funds and programmes — internallyorganized as suits their overall needs — to contributestaff to coherent, interdepartmental/inter-agency taskforces built to provide that support.

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214. The IMTF structure could have significantimplications for how DPKO’s Office of Operations iscurrently structured, and in effect would supplant theRegional Divisions structure. For example, the largeroperations, such as those in Sierra Leone, East Timorand Kosovo, each would warrant separate IMTFs,headed by Director-level officers. Other missions, suchas the long-established “traditional” peacekeepingoperations in Asia and the Middle East, might begrouped into another IMTF. The number of IMTFs thatcould be formed would largely depend on the amountof additional resources allocated to DPKO, DPA andrelated departments, agencies, funds and programmes.As the number of IMTFs increased, the organizationalstructure of the Office of Operations would becomeflatter. There could be similar implications for theAssistant Secretaries-General of DPA, to whom theheads of the IMTFs would report during thepeacemaking phase or when setting up a large peace-building support operation either as a follow-onpresence to a peacekeeping operation or as a separateinitiative.

215. While the regional directors of DPKO (and DPAin those cases where they were appointed as IMTFheads) would be in charge of overseeing fewermissions than at present, they would actually bemanaging a larger number of staff, such as thoseseconded full-time from the Military and CivilianPolice Advisers’ Offices, FALD (or its successordivisions) and other departments, agencies, funds andprogrammes, as required. The size of the IMTFs willalso depend on the amount of additional resourcesprovided, without which participating entities wouldnot be in a position to second their staff on a full-timebasis.

216. It should also be noted that in order for the IMTFconcept to work effectively, its members must bephysically co-located during the planning and initialdeployment phases. This will not be possible at presentwithout major adjustments to current office spaceallocations in the Secretariat.

217. Summary of key recommendation onintegrated mission planning and support:Integrated Mission Task Forces (IMTFs), withmembers seconded from throughout the UnitedNations system, as necessary, should be thestandard vehicle for mission-specific planning andsupport. IMTFs should serve as the first point ofcontact for all such support, and IMTF leaders

should have temporary line authority over secondedpersonnel, in accordance with agreements betweenDPKO, DPA and other contributing departments,programmes, funds and agencies.

C. Other structural adjustments requiredin the Department of PeacekeepingOperations

218. The IMTF concept would strengthen the capacityof DPKO’s Office of Operations to function as a realfocal point for all aspects of a peacekeeping operation.However, structural adjustments are also required inother elements of DPKO, in particular to the Militaryand Civilian Police Division, FALD and the LessonsLearned Unit.

1. Military and Civilian Police Division

219. All civilian police officials interviewed atHeadquarters and in the field expressed frustration withhaving police functions in DPKO included in a militaryreporting chain. The Panel agrees that there seems tobe little administrative or substantive value added inthis arrangement.

220. Military and civilian police officers in DPKOserve for three years because the United Nationsrequires that they be on active duty. If they wish toremain longer and would even leave their nationalmilitary or police services to do so, United Nationspersonnel policy precludes their being hired into theirprevious position. Hence the turnover rate in themilitary and police offices of DPKO is high. Sincelessons learned in Headquarters practice are notroutinely captured, since comprehensive trainingprogrammes for new arrivals are non-existent and sinceuser-friendly manuals and standard operatingprocedures remain half-complete, high turnover meansroutine loss of institutional memory that takes monthsof on-the-job learning to replace. Current staffshortages also mean that military and civilian policeofficers find themselves assigned to functions that donot necessarily match their expertise. Those who havespecialized in operations (J3) or plans (J5) might findthemselves engaged in quasi-diplomatic work orfunctioning as personnel and administration officers(J1), managing the continual turnover of people andunits in the field, to the detriment of their ability tomonitor operational activity in the field.

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221. DPKO’s lack of continuity in these areas mayalso explain why, after over 50 years of deployingmilitary observers to monitor ceasefire violations,DPKO still does not have a standard database thatcould be provided to military observers in the field todocument ceasefire violations and generate statistics.At present, if one wanted to know how many violationshad occurred over a six-month period in a particularcountry where an operation is deployed, someonewould have to physically count each one in the papercopies of the daily situation reports for that period.Where such databases do exist, they have been createdby the missions themselves on an ad hoc basis. Thesame applies to the variety of crime statistics and otherinformation common to most civilian police missions.Technological advances have also revolutionized theway in which ceasefire violations and movements indemilitarized zones and removal of weapons fromstorage sites can be monitored. However, there is noone in DPKO’s Military and Civilian Police Divisioncurrently assigned to addressing these issues.

222. The Panel recommends that the Military andPolice Division be separated into two separate entities,one for the military and the other for the civilianpolice. The Military Adviser’s Office of DPKO shouldbe enlarged and restructured to correspond moreclosely to the way in which the military headquarters inUnited Nations peacekeeping operations are structured,so as to provide more effective support to the field andbetter informed military advice to senior officials in theSecretariat. The Civilian Police Unit should also beprovided with substantial additional resources, andconsideration should be given to upgrading the rankand level of the Civilian Police Adviser.

223. To ensure a minimum of continuity of DPKO’smilitary and civilian police capacity, the Panelrecommends that a percentage of the added positions inthese two units be reserved for military and civilianpolice personnel who have prior United Nationsexperience and have recently left their nationalservices, to be appointed as regular staff members. Thiswould follow the precedent set in the Logistics andCommunications Service of FALD, which includes anumber of former military officers.

224. Civilian police in the field are increasinglyinvolved in the restructuring and reform of local policeforces, and the Panel has recommended a doctrinalshift that would make such activities a primary focusfor civilian police in future peace operations (see paras.

39, 40 and 47 (b) above). However, to date, theCivilian Police Unit formulates plans and requirementsfor the police components of peace operations withoutthe benefit of the requisite legal advice on localjudicial structures, criminal laws, codes and proceduresin effect in the country concerned. This is vitalinformation for civilian police planners, yet it is not afunction for which resources have hitherto beenallocated from the Support Account, either to OLA,DPKO or any other department in the Secretariat.

225. The Panel therefore recommends that a new,separate unit be established in DPKO, staffed with therequisite experts in criminal law, specifically for thepurpose of providing advice to the Civilian PoliceAdviser’s Office on those rule of law issues that arecritical to the effective use of civilian police in peaceoperations. This unit should also work closely with theOffice of the United Nations High Commissioner forHuman Rights in Geneva, the Office for Drug Controland Crime Prevention in Vienna, and other parts of theUnited Nations system that focus on the reform of ruleof law institutions and respect for human rights.

2. Field Administration and Logistics Division

226. FALD does not have the authority to finalize andpresent the budgets for the field operations that itplans, nor to actually procure the goods and servicesthey need. That authority rests with the PeacekeepingFinancing and Procurement Divisions of DM. AllHeadquarters-based procurement requests areprocessed by the 16 Support Account-fundedprocurement officers in the Procurement Division, whoprepare the larger contracts (roughly 300 in 1999) forpresentation to the Headquarters Committee onContracts, negotiate and award contracts for goods andservices not procured locally by the field missions, andformulate United Nations policies and procedures forboth global and local mission procurement. Thecombination of staffing constraints and the extra stepsentailed in this process appears to contribute to theprocurement delays reported by field missions.

227. Procurement efficiency could be enhanced bydelegating peacekeeping budgeting and presentation,allotment issuance and procurement authority to DPKOfor a two-year trial period, with the correspondingtransfer of posts and staff. In order to ensureaccountability and transparency, DM should retainauthority for accounts, assessment of Member Statesand treasury functions. It should also retain its overall

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policy setting and monitoring role, as it has in the caseof recruitment and administration of field personnel,authority and responsibility, which are alreadydelegated to DPKO.

228. Furthermore, to avoid allegations of improprietythat may arise from having those responsible forbudgeting and procurement working in the samedivision as those identifying the requirements, thePanel recommends that FALD be separated into twodivisions: one for Administrative Services, in whichthe personnel, budget/finance and procurementfunctions would reside, and the other for IntegratedSupport Services (e.g., logistics, transport,communications).

3. Lessons Learned Unit

229. All are agreed on the need to exploit cumulatingfield experience but not enough has been done toimprove the system’s ability to tap that experience or tofeed it back into the development of operationaldoctrine, plans, procedures or mandates. The work ofDPKO’s existing Lessons Learned Unit does not seemto have had a great deal of impact on peace operationspractice, and the compilation of lessons learned seemsto occur mostly after a mission has ended. This isunfortunate because the peacekeeping system isgenerating new experience — new lessons — on adaily basis. That experience should be captured andretained for the benefit of other current operators andfuture operations. Lessons learned should be thought ofas a facet of information management that contributesto improving operations on a daily basis. Post-actionreports would then be just one part of a larger learningprocess, the capstone summary rather than the principalobjective of the entire process.

230. The Panel feels that this function is in urgentneed of enhancement and recommends that it belocated where it can work closely with and contributeeffectively to ongoing operations as well as missionplanning and doctrine/guidelines development. ThePanel suggests that this might best be in the Office ofOperations, which will oversee the functions of theIntegrated Mission Task Forces that the Panel hasproposed to integrate Headquarters planning andsupport for peace operations (see paras. 198-217above). Located in an element of DPKO that willroutinely incorporate representatives from manydepartments and agencies, the unit could serve as thepeace operations “learning manager” for all of those

entities, maintaining and updating the institutionalmemory that missions and task forces alike could drawupon for problem solving, best practices and practicesto avoid.

4. Senior management

231. There are currently two Assistant Secretaries-General in DPKO: one for the Office of Operations andthe other for the Office of Logistics, Management andMine Action (FALD and the Mine Action Service). TheMilitary Adviser, who concurrently serves as theDirector of the Military and Civilian Police Division,currently reports to the Under-Secretary-General forPeacekeeping Operations through one of the twoAssistant Secretaries-General or directly to the Under-Secretary-General, depending on the nature of the issueconcerned.

232. In the light of the various staff increases andstructural adjustments proposed in the precedingsections, the Panel believes that there is a strong caseto be made for the Department to be provided with athird Assistant Secretary-General. The Panel furtherbelieves that one of the three Assistant Secretaries-General should be designated as a “Principal AssistantSecretary-General” and function as deputy to theUnder-Secretary-General.

233. Summary of key recommendations on otherstructural adjustments in DPKO:

(a) The current Military and Civilian PoliceDivision should be restructured, moving theCivilian Police Unit out of the military reportingchain. Consideration should be given to upgradingthe rank and level of the Civilian Police Adviser;

(b) The Military Adviser’s Office in DPKOshould be restructured to correspond more closelyto the way in which the military field headquartersin United Nations peacekeeping operations arestructured;

(c) A new unit should be established inDPKO and staffed with the relevant expertise forthe provision of advice on criminal law issues thatare critical to the effective use of civilian police inUnited Nations peace operations;

(d) The Under-Secretary-General forManagement should delegate authority andresponsibility for peacekeeping-related budgetingand procurement functions to the Under-Secretary-

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General for Peacekeeping Operations for a two-yeartrial period;

(e) The Lessons Learned Unit should besubstantially enhanced and moved into a revampedDPKO Office of Operations;

(f) Consideration should be given toincreasing the number of Assistant Secretaries-General in DPKO from two to three, with one of thethree designated as the “Principal AssistantSecretary-General” and functioning as the deputyto the Under-Secretary-General.

D. Structural adjustments needed outsidethe Department of PeacekeepingOperations

234. Public information planning and support atHeadquarters needs strengthening, as do elements inDPA that support and coordinate peace-buildingactivities and provide electoral support. Outside theSecretariat, the ability of the Office of the UnitedNations High Commissioner for Human Rights to planand support the human rights components of peaceoperations needs to be reinforced.

1. Operational support for public information

235. Unlike military, civilian police, mine action,logistics, telecommunications and other missioncomponents, no unit at Headquarters has specific lineresponsibility for the operational requirements ofpublic information components in peace operations.The most concentrated responsibility for mission-related public information rests with the Office of theSpokesman of the Secretary General and the respectivespokespersons and public information offices in themissions themselves. At Headquarters, fourprofessional officers in the Peace and Security Section,nested within the Promotion and Planning Service ofthe Public Affairs Division in DPI, are responsible forproducing publications, developing and updating website content on peace operations, and dealing with otherissues ranging from disarmament to humanitarianassistance. While the Section produces and managesinformation about peacekeeping, it has had littlecapacity to create doctrine, strategy or standardoperating procedures for public information functionsin the field, other than on a sporadic and ad hoc basis.

236. The DPI Peace and Security Section is beingexpanded somewhat through internal DPIredeployment of staff, but it should either besubstantially expanded and made operational or thesupport function should be moved into DPKO, withsome of its officers perhaps seconded from DPI.

237. Wherever the function is located, it shouldanticipate public information needs and the technologyand people to meet them, set priorities and standardfield operating procedures, provide support in the start-up phase of new missions, and provide continuingsupport and guidance through participation in theIntegrated Mission Task Forces.

238. Summary of key recommendation onstructural adjustments in public information: a unitfor operational planning and support of publicinformation in peace operations should beestablished, either within DPKO or within a newPeace and Security Information Service in DPIreporting directly to the Under-Secretary-Generalfor Communication and Public Information.

2. Peace-building support in the Department ofPolitical Affairs

239. The Department of Political Affairs (DPA) is thedesignated focal point for United Nations peace-building efforts and currently has responsibility forsetting up, supporting and/or advising peace-buildingoffices and special political missions in a dozencountries, plus the activities of five envoys andrepresentatives of the Secretary-General who have beengiven peacemaking or conflict prevention assignments.Regular budget funds that support these activitiesthrough the next calendar year are expected to fall $31million or 25 per cent below need. Such assessedfunding is in fact relatively rare in peace-building,where most activities are funded by voluntarydonations.

240. DPA’s nascent Peace-building Support Unit is onesuch activity. In his capacity as Convener of ECPS andfocal point for peace-building strategies, the Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs must be able tocoordinate the formulation of such strategies with themembers of ECPS and other elements of the UnitedNations system, particularly those in the developmentand humanitarian fields given the cross-cutting natureof peace-building itself. To do so, the Secretariat isassembling voluntary funds from a number of donors

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for a three-year pilot project in support of the unit. Asthe planning for this pilot unit evolves, the Panel urgesDPA to consult with all stakeholders in the UnitedNations system that can contribute to its success, inparticular UNDP, which is placing renewed emphasison democracy/governance and other transition-relatedareas.

241. DPA’s executive office supports some of theoperational efforts for which it is responsible, but it isneither designed nor equipped to be a field supportoffice. FALD also provides support to some of the fieldmissions managed by DPA, but neither those missions’budgets nor DPA’s budget allocate additional resourcesto FALD for this purpose. FALD attempts to meet thedemands of the smaller peace-building operations butacknowledges that the larger operations make severe,high-priority demands on its current staffing. Thus theneeds of smaller missions tend to suffer. DPA has hadsatisfactory experience with support from the UnitedNations Office of Project Services (UNOPS), a five-year-old spin-off from UNDP that managesprogrammes and funds for many clients within theUnited Nations system, using modern managementpractices and drawing all of its core funding from amanagement charge of up to 13 per cent. UNOPS canprovide logistics, management and recruitment supportfor smaller missions fairly quickly.

242. DPA’s Electoral Assistance Division (EAD) alsorelies on voluntary money to meet growing demand forits technical advice, needs assessment missions andother activities not directly involving electoralobservation. As of June 2000, 41 requests forassistance were pending from Member States but thetrust fund supporting such “non-earmarked” activitiesheld just 8 per cent of the funding required to meetcurrent requests through the end of calendar year 2001.So, as demand surges for a key element of democraticinstitution-building endorsed by the General Assemblyin its resolution 46/137, EAD staff must first raise theprogramme funds needed to do their jobs.

243. Summary of key recommendations for peace-building support in the Department of PoliticalAffairs:

(a) The Panel supports the Secretariat’seffort to create a pilot Peace-building Unit withinDPA in cooperation with other integral UnitedNations elements, and suggests that regularbudgetary support for the unit be revisited by the

membership if the pilot programme works well. Theprogramme should be evaluated in the context ofguidance the Panel has provided in paragraph 46above, and if considered the best available optionfor strengthening United Nations peace-buildingcapacity it should be presented to the Secretary-General as per the recommendation contained inparagraph 47 (d) above;

(b) The Panel recommends that regularbudget resources for Electoral Assistance Divisionprogrammatic expenses be substantially increasedto meet the rapidly growing demand for its services,in lieu of voluntary contributions;

(c) To relieve demand on FALD and theexecutive office of DPA, and to improve supportservices rendered to smaller political and peace-building field offices, the Panel recommends thatprocurement, logistics, staff recruitment and othersupport services for all such smaller, non-militaryfield missions be provided by the United NationsOffice for Project Services (UNOPS).

3. Peace operations support in the Office of theUnited Nations High Commissioner for HumanRights

244. OHCHR needs to be more closely involved inplanning and executing the elements of peaceoperations that address human rights, especiallycomplex operations. At present, OHCHR hasinadequate resources to be so involved or to providepersonnel for service in the field. If United Nationsoperations are to have effective human rightscomponents, OHCHR should be able to coordinate andinstitutionalize human rights field work in peaceoperations; second personnel to Integrated MissionTask Forces in New York; recruit human rights fieldpersonnel; organize human rights training for allpersonnel in peace operations, including the law andorder components; and create model databases forhuman rights field work.

245. Summary of key recommendation onstrengthening the Office of the United Nations HighCommissioner for Human Rights: the Panelrecommends substantially enhancing the fieldmission planning and preparation capacity of theOffice of the United Nations High Commissioner forHuman Rights, with funding partly from the

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regular budget and partly from peace operationsmission budgets.

V. Peace operations and theinformation age

246. Threaded through many parts of the presentreport are references to the need to better link the peaceand security system together; to facilitatecommunications and data sharing; to give staff thetools that they need to do their work; and ultimately toallow the United Nations to be more effective atpreventing conflict and helping societies find their wayback from war. Modern, well utilized informationtechnology (IT) is a key enabler of many of theseobjectives. The present section notes the gaps instrategy, policy and practice that impede the UnitedNations effective use of IT, and offersrecommendations to bridge them.

A. Information technology in peaceoperations: strategy and policy issues

247. The problem of IT strategy and policy is biggerthan peace operations and extends to the entire UnitedNations system. That larger IT context is generallybeyond the Panel’s mandate, but the larger issuesshould not preclude the adoption of common IT userstandards for peace operations and for the Headquartersunits that give support to them. FALD’sCommunications Service can provide the satellite linksand the local connectivity upon which missions canbuild effective IT networks and databases, but a betterstrategy and policy needs to be developed for the usercommunity to help it take advantage of the technologyfoundations that are now being laid.

248. When the United Nations deploys a mission intothe field, it is critical that its elements be able toexchange data easily. All complex peace operationsbring together many different actors: agencies, funds,and programmes from throughout the United Nationssystem, as well as the Departments of the Secretariat;mission recruits who are new to the United Nationssystem; on occasion, regional organizations; frequently,bilateral aid agencies; and always, dozens to hundredsof humanitarian and development NGOs. All of themneed a mechanism that makes it easier to shareinformation and ideas efficiently, the more so because

each is but the small tip of a very large bureaucraticiceberg with its own culture, working methods andobjectives.

249. Poorly planned and poorly integrated IT can poseobstacles to such cooperation. When there are noagreed standards for data structure and interchange atthe application level, the “interface” between the two islaborious manual recoding, which tends to defeat thepurposes of investing in a networked and computer-heavy working environment. The consequences canalso be more serious than wasted labour, ranging frommiscommunication of policy to a failure to “get theword” on security threats or other major changes in theoperational environment.

250. The irony of distributed and decentralized datasystems is that they need such common standards tofunction. Common solutions to common IT problemsare difficult to produce at higher levels — betweensubstantive components of an operation, betweensubstantive offices at Headquarters, or betweenHeadquarters and the rest of the United Nationssystem — in part because existing operationalinformation systems policy formulation is scattered.Headquarters lacks a sufficiently strong responsibilitycentre for user-level IT strategy and policy in peaceoperations, in particular. In government or industry,such responsibility would rest with a “ChiefInformation Officer”. The Panel believes the UnitedNations needs someone at Headquarters, most usefullyin EISAS, to play such a role, supervising developmentand implementation of IT strategy and user standards.He or she should also develop and oversee IT trainingprogrammes, both field manuals and hands-ontraining — the need for which is substantial and not tobe underestimated. Counterparts in the SRSG’s officein each field mission should oversee implementation ofthe common IT strategy and supervise field training,both complementing and building on the work ofFALD and the Information Technology ServicesDivision (ITSD) in the Department of Management inproviding basic IT structures and services.

251. Summary of key recommendation oninformation technology strategy and policy:Headquarters peace and security departments needa responsibility centre to devise and oversee theimplementation of common information technologystrategy and training for peace operations, residingin EISAS. Mission counterparts to thatresponsibility centre should also be appointed to

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serve in the offices of the SRSGs in complex peaceoperations to oversee the implementation of thatstrategy.

B. Tools for knowledge management

252. Technology can help to capture as well asdisseminate information and experience. It could bemuch better utilized to help a wide variety of actorsworking in a United Nations mission’s area ofoperation to acquire and share data in a systematic andmutually supportive manner. United Nationsdevelopment and humanitarian relief communities, forexample, work in most of the places where the UnitedNations has deployed peace operations. These UnitedNations country teams, plus the NGOs that docomplementary work at the grass-roots level, will havebeen in the region long before a complex peaceoperation arrives and will remain after it has left.Together, they hold a wealth of local knowledge andexperience that could be helpful to peace operationsplanning and implementation. An electronic dataclearing house, managed by EISAS to share this data,could assist mission planning and execution and alsoaid conflict prevention and assessment. Proper meldingof these data and data gathered subsequent todeployment by the various components of a peaceoperation and their use with geographic informationsystems (GIS) could create powerful tools for trackingneeds and problems in the mission area and fortracking the impact of action plans. GIS specialistsshould be assigned to every mission team, togetherwith GIS training resources.

253. Current examples of GIS applications can be seenin the humanitarian and reconstruction work done inKosovo since 1998. The Humanitarian CommunityInformation Centre has pooled GIS data produced bysuch sources as the Western European Satellite Centre,the Geneva Centre for Humanitarian Demining, KFOR,the Yugoslav Institute of Statistics and the InternationalManagement Group. Those data have been combined tocreate an atlas that is available publicly on their website, on CD-ROMs for those with slow or non-existentInternet access and in hard copy.

254. Computer simulations can be powerful learningtools for mission personnel and for the local parties.Simulations can, in principle, be created for anycomponent of an operation. They can facilitate groupproblem-solving and reveal to local parties the

sometimes unintended consequences of their policychoices. With appropriate broadband Internet links,simulations can be part of distance learning packagestailored to a new operation and used to pre-train newmission recruits.

255. An enhanced peace and security area on theUnited Nations Intranet (the Organization’sinformation network that is open to a specified set ofusers) would be a valuable addition to peace operationsplanning, analysis, and execution. A subset of thelarger network, it would focus on drawing togetherissues and information that directly pertain to peaceand security, including EISAS analyses, situationreports, GIS maps and linkages to lessons learned.Varying levels of security access could facilitate thesharing of sensitive information among restrictedgroups.

256. The data in the Intranet should be linked to aPeace Operations Extranet (POE) that would useexisting and planned wide area networkcommunications to link Headquarters databases inEISAS and the substantive offices with the field, andfield missions with one another. POE could easilycontain all administrative, procedural and legalinformation for peace operations, and could providesingle-point access to information generated by manysources, give planners the ability to producecomprehensive reports more quickly and improveresponse time to emergency situations.

257. Some mission components, such as civilian policeand related criminal justice units and human rightsinvestigators, require added network security, as wellas the hardware and software that can support therequired levels of data storage, transmission andanalysis. Two key technologies for civilian police areGIS and crime mapping software, used to convert rawdata into geographical representations that illustratecrime trends and other key information, facilitaterecognition of patterns of events, or highlight specialfeatures of problem areas, improving the ability ofcivilian police to fight crime or to advise their localcounterparts.

258. Summary of key recommendations oninformation technology tools in peace operations:

(a) EISAS, in cooperation with ITSD, shouldimplement an enhanced peace operations elementon the current United Nations Intranet and link it

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to the missions through a Peace OperationsExtranet (POE);

(b) Peace operations could benefit greatlyfrom more extensive use of geographic informationsystems (GIS) technology, which quickly integratesoperational information with electronic maps of themission area, for applications as diverse asdemobilization, civilian policing, voter registration,human rights monitoring and reconstruction;

(c) The IT needs of mission components withunique information technology needs, such ascivilian police and human rights, should beanticipated and met more consistently in missionplanning and implementation.

C. Improving the timeliness of Internet-based public information

259. As the Panel noted in section III above,effectively communicating the work of United Nationspeace operations to the public is essential to creatingand maintaining support for current and futuremissions. Not only is it essential to develop a positiveimage early on to promote a conducive workingenvironment but it is also important to maintain a solidpublic information campaign to garner and retainsupport from the international community.

260. The body now officially responsible forcommunicating the work of United Nations peaceoperations is the Peace and Security Section of DPI inHeadquarters, as discussed in section IV above. Oneperson in DPI is responsible for the actual posting ofall peace and security content on the web site, as wellas for posting all mission inputs to the web, to ensurethat information posted is consistent and compatiblewith Headquarters web standards.

261. The Panel endorses the application of standardsbut standardized need not mean centralized. Thecurrent process of news production and posting of datato the United Nations web site slows down the cycle ofupdates, yet daily updates could be important to amission in a fast-moving situation. It also limits theamount of information that can be presented on eachmission.

262. DPI and field staff have expressed interest inrelieving this bottleneck through the development of a“web site co-management” model. This seems to the

Panel to be an appropriate solution to this particularinformation bottleneck.

263. Summary of key recommendation ontimeliness of Internet-based public information: thePanel encourages the development of web site co-management by Headquarters and the fieldmissions, in which Headquarters would maintainoversight but individual missions would have staffauthorized to produce and post web content thatconforms to basic presentational standards andpolicy.

* * *

264. In the present report, the Panel has emphasizedthe need to change the structure and practices of theOrganization in order to enable it to pursue moreeffectively its responsibilities in support ofinternational peace and security and respect for humanrights. Some of those changes would not be feasiblewithout the new capacities that networked informationtechnologies provide. The report itself would havebeen impossible to produce without the technologiesalready in place at United Nations Headquarters andaccessible to members of the Panel in every region ofthe world. People use effective tools, and effectiveinformation technology could be much better utilizedin the service of peace.

VI. Challenges to implementation

265. The present report targets two groups inpresenting its recommendations for reform: theMember States and the Secretariat. We recognize thatreform will not occur unless Member States genuinelypursue it. At the same time, we believe that the changeswe recommend for the Secretariat must be activelyadvanced by the Secretary-General and implementedby his senior staff.

266. Member States must recognize that the UnitedNations is the sum of its parts and accept that theprimary responsibility for reform lies with them. Thefailures of the United Nations are not those of theSecretariat alone, or troop commanders or the leadersof field missions. Most occurred because the SecurityCouncil and the Member States crafted and supportedambiguous, inconsistent and under-funded mandatesand then stood back and watched as they failed,sometimes even adding critical public commentary as

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the credibility of the United Nations underwent itsseverest tests.

267. The problems of command and control thatrecently arose in Sierra Leone are the most recentillustration of what cannot be tolerated any longer.Troop contributors must ensure that the troops theyprovide fully understand the importance of anintegrated chain of command, the operational controlof the Secretary-General and the standard operatingprocedures and rules of engagement of the mission. Itis essential that the chain of command in an operationbe understood and respected, and the onus is onnational capitals to refrain from instructing theircontingent commanders on operational matters.

268. We are aware that the Secretary-General isimplementing a comprehensive reform programme andrealize that our recommendations may need to beadjusted to fit within this bigger picture. Furthermore,the reforms we have recommended for the Secretariatand the United Nations system in general will not beaccomplished overnight, though some require urgentaction. We recognize that there is a normal resistanceto change in any bureaucracy, and are encouraged thatsome of the changes we have embraced asrecommendations originate from within the system. Weare also encouraged by the commitment of theSecretary-General to lead the Secretariat toward reformeven if it means that long-standing organizational andprocedural lines will have to be breached, and thataspects of the Secretariat’s priorities and culture willneed to be challenged and changed. In this connection,we urge the Secretary-General to appoint a seniorofficial with responsibility for overseeing theimplementation of the recommendations contained inthe present report.

269. The Secretary-General has consistentlyemphasized the need for the United Nations to reachout to civil society and to strengthen relations withnon-governmental organizations, academic institutionsand the media, who can be useful partners in thepromotion of peace and security for all. We call on theSecretariat to take heed of the Secretary-General’sapproach and implement it in its work in peace andsecurity. We call on them to constantly keep in mindthat the United Nations they serve is the universalorganization. People everywhere are fully entitled toconsider that it is their organization, and as such topass judgement on its activities and the people whoserve in it.

270. There is wide variation in quality amongSecretariat staff supporting the peace and securityfunctions in DPKO, DPA and the other departmentsconcerned. This observation applies to the civiliansrecruited by the Secretariat as well as to the militaryand civilian police personnel proposed by MemberStates. These disparities are widely recognized bythose in the system. Better performers are givenunreasonable workloads to compensate for those whoare less capable. Naturally, this can be bad for moraleand can create resentment, particularly among thosewho rightly point out that the United Nations has notdedicated enough attention over the years to careerdevelopment, training and mentoring or the institutionof modern management practices. Put simply, theUnited Nations is far from being a meritocracy today,and unless it takes steps to become one it will not beable to reverse the alarming trend of qualifiedpersonnel, the young among them in particular, leavingthe Organization. If the hiring, promotion anddelegation of responsibility rely heavily on seniority orpersonal or political connections, qualified people willhave no incentive to join the Organization or stay withit. Unless managers at all levels, beginning with theSecretary-General and his senior staff, seriouslyaddress this problem on a priority basis, rewardexcellence and remove incompetent staff, additionalresources will be wasted and lasting reform willbecome impossible.

271. The same level of scrutiny should apply to UnitedNations personnel in the field missions. The majorityof them embody the spirit of what it means to be aninternational civil servant, travelling to war-torn landsand dangerous environments to help improve the livesof the world’s most vulnerable communities. They doso with considerable personal sacrifice, and at timeswith great risks to their own physical safety and mentalhealth. They deserve the world’s recognition andappreciation. Over the years, many of them have giventheir lives in the service of peace and we take thisopportunity to honour their memory.

272. United Nations personnel in the field, perhapsmore than any others, are obliged to respect localnorms, culture and practices. They must go out of theirway to demonstrate that respect, as a start, by getting toknow their host environment and trying to learn asmuch of the local culture and language as they can.They must behave with the understanding that they areguests in someone else’s home, however destroyed that

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home might be, particularly when the United Nationstakes on a transitional administration role. And theymust also treat one another with respect and dignity,with particular sensitivity towards gender and culturaldifferences.

273. In short, we believe that a very high standardshould be maintained for the selection and conduct ofpersonnel at Headquarters and in the field. WhenUnited Nations personnel fail to meet such standards,they should be held accountable. In the past, theSecretariat has had difficulty in holding senior officialsin the field accountable for their performance becausethose officials could point to insufficient resources,unclear instructions or lack of appropriate commandand control arrangements as the main impediments tosuccessful implementation of a mission’s mandate.These deficiencies should be addressed but should notbe allowed to offer cover to poor performers. Thefuture of nations, the lives of those whom the UnitedNations has come to help and protect, the success of amission and the credibility of the Organization can allhinge on what a few individuals do or fail to do.Anyone who turns out to be unsuited to the task that heor she has agreed to perform must be removed from amission, no matter how high or how low they may beon the ladder.

274. Member States themselves acknowledge thatthey, too, need to reflect on their working culture andmethods, at least as concerns the conduct of UnitedNations peace and security activities. The tradition ofthe recitation of statements, followed by a painstakingprocess of achieving consensus, places considerableemphasis on the diplomatic process over operationalproduct. While one of the United Nations main virtuesis that it provides a forum for 189 Member States toexchange views on pressing global issues, sometimesdialogue alone is not enough to ensure that billion-dollar peacekeeping operations, vital conflictprevention measures or critical peacemaking effortssucceed in the face of great odds. Expressions ofgeneral support in the form of statements andresolutions must be followed up with tangible action.

275. Moreover, Member States may send conflictingmessages regarding the actions they advocate, withtheir representatives voicing political support in onebody but denying financial support in another. Suchinconsistencies have appeared between the FifthCommittee on Administrative and Budgetary Matterson the one hand, and the Security Council and the

Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations on theother.

276. On the political level, many of the local partieswith whom peacekeepers and peacemakers are dealingon a daily basis may neither respect nor fear verbalcondemnation by the Security Council. It is thereforeincumbent that Council members and the membershipat large breathe life into the words that they produce, asdid the Security Council delegation that flew to Jakartaand Dili in the wake of the East Timor crisis last year,an example of effective Council action at its best: res,non verba.

277. Meanwhile, the financial constraints under whichthe United Nations labours continue to cause seriousdamage to its ability to conduct peace operations in acredible and professional manner. We therefore urgethat Member States uphold their treaty obligations andpay their dues in full, on time and without condition.

278. We are also aware that there are other issueswhich, directly or indirectly, hamper effective UnitedNations action in the field of peace and security,including two unresolved issues that are beyond thescope of the Panel’s mandate but critical to peaceoperations and that only the Member States canaddress. They are the disagreements about howassessments in support of peacekeeping operations areapportioned and about equitable representation on theSecurity Council. We can only hope that the MemberStates will find a way to resolve their differences onthese issues in the interests of upholding theircollective international responsibility as prescribed inthe Charter.

279. We call on the leaders of the world assembled atthe Millennium Summit, as they renew theircommitment to the ideals of the United Nations, tocommit as well to strengthen the capacity of the UnitedNations to fully accomplish the mission which is,indeed, its very raison d’être: to help communitiesengulfed in strife and to maintain or restore peace.

280. While building consensus for therecommendations in the present report, we — themembers of the Panel on United Nations PeaceOperations — have also come to a shared vision of aUnited Nations, extending a strong helping hand to acommunity, country or region to avert conflict or toend violence. We see an SRSG ending a mission wellaccomplished, having given the people of a country theopportunity to do for themselves what they could not

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do before: to build and hold onto peace, to findreconciliation, to strengthen democracy, to securehuman rights. We see, above all, a United Nations thathas not only the will but also the ability to fulfil itsgreat promise and to justify the confidence and trustplaced in it by the overwhelming majority ofhumankind.

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Annex IMembers of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations

Mr. J. Brian Atwood (United States), President, Citizens International; formerPresident, National Democratic Institute; former Administrator, United StatesAgency for International Development.

Mr. Lakhdar Brahimi (Algeria), former Foreign Minister; Chairman of the Panel.

Ambassador Colin Granderson (Trinidad and Tobago), Executive Director ofOrganization of American States (OAS)/United Nations International CivilianMission in Haiti, 1993-2000; head of OAS election observation missions in Haiti(1995 and 1997) and Suriname (2000).

Dame Ann Hercus (New Zealand), former Cabinet Minister and PermanentRepresentative of New Zealand to the United Nations; Head of Mission of theUnited Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP), 1998-1999.

Mr. Richard Monk (United Kingdom), former member of Her Majesty’sInspectorate of Constabulary and Government adviser on international policingmatters; Commissioner of the United Nations International Police Task Force inBosnia and Herzegovina, 1998-1999.

General (ret.) Klaus Naumann (Germany), Chief of Defence, 1991-1996;Chairman of the Military Committee of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization(NATO), 1996-1999, with oversight responsibility for NATO ImplementationForce/Stabilization Force operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the NATOKosovo air campaign.

Ms. Hisako Shimura (Japan), President of Tsuda College, Tokyo; served for 24years in the United Nations Secretariat, retiring from United Nations service in 1995as Director, Europe and Latin America Division of the Department of PeacekeepingOperations.

Ambassador Vladimir Shustov (Russian Federation), Ambassador at large, with30 years association with the United Nations; former Deputy PermanentRepresentative to the United Nations in New York; former representative of theRussian Federation to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

General Philip Sibanda (Zimbabwe), Chief of Staff, Operations and Training,Zimbabwe Army Headquarters, Harare; former Force Commander of the UnitedNations Angola Verification Mission (UNAVEM III) and the United NationsObserver Mission in Angola (MONUA), 1995-1998.

Dr. Cornelio Sommaruga (Switzerland), President of the Foundation of MoralRearmament, Caux, and of the Geneva International Centre for HumanitarianDemining; former President of the International Committee of the Red Cross, 1987-1999.

* * *

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Office of the Chairman of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations

Dr. William Durch, Senior Associate, Henry L. Stimson Center; Project Director

Mr. Salman Ahmed, Political Affairs Officer, United Nations Secretariat

Ms. Clare Kane, Personal Assistant, United Nations Secretariat

Ms. Caroline Earle, Research Associate, Stimson Center

Mr. J. Edward Palmisano, Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellow, Stimson Center

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Annex IIReferences

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________ Report of the Secretary-General on theprotection of civilians in armed conflict.(S/1999/957)

________ Letter dated 15 December 1999 from theSecretary-General addressed to the President ofthe Security Council, enclosing the report of theIndependent Inquiry into the actions of the UnitedNations during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.(S/1999/1257)

________ Report of the Secretary-General on the roleof United Nations peacekeeping in disarmament,demobilization and reintegration. (S/2000/101)

Letter dated 10 March 2000 from the Chairman of theSecurity Council Committee established pursuantto resolution 864 (1993) concerning the situationin Angola addressed to the President of theSecurity Council, enclosing the report of thePanel of Experts on Violations of SecurityCouncil Sanctions against UNITA. (S/2000/203)

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Annex IIISummary of recommendations

1. Preventive action:

(a) The Panel endorses the recommendations ofthe Secretary-General with respect to conflictprevention contained in the Millennium Report and inhis remarks before the Security Council’s second openmeeting on conflict prevention in July 2000, inparticular his appeal to “all who are engaged in conflictprevention and development — the United Nations, theBretton Woods institutions, Governments and civilsociety organizations — [to] address these challengesin a more integrated fashion”;

(b) The Panel supports the Secretary-General’smore frequent use of fact-finding missions to areas oftension, and stresses Member States’ obligations, underArticle 2(5) of the Charter, to give “every assistance”to such activities of the United Nations.

2. Peace-building strategy:

(a) A small percentage of a mission’s first-yearbudget should be made available to the representativeor special representative of the Secretary-Generalleading the mission to fund quick impact projects in itsarea of operations, with the advice of the UnitedNations country team’s resident coordinator;

(b) The Panel recommends a doctrinal shift inthe use of civilian police, other rule of law elementsand human rights experts in complex peace operationsto reflect an increased focus on strengthening rule oflaw institutions and improving respect for human rightsin post-conflict environments;

(c) The Panel recommends that the legislativebodies consider bringing demobilization andreintegration programmes into the assessed budgets ofcomplex peace operations for the first phase of anoperation in order to facilitate the rapid disassembly offighting factions and reduce the likelihood of resumedconflict;

(d) The Panel recommends that the ExecutiveCommittee on Peace and Security (ECPS) discuss andrecommend to the Secretary-General a plan tostrengthen the permanent capacity of the UnitedNations to develop peace-building strategies and toimplement programmes in support of those strategies.

3. Peacekeeping doctrine and strategy: oncedeployed, United Nations peacekeepers must be able tocarry out their mandates professionally andsuccessfully and be capable of defending themselves,other mission components and the mission’s mandate,with robust rules of engagement, against those whorenege on their commitments to a peace accord orotherwise seek to undermine it by violence.

4. Clear, credible and achievable mandates:

(a) The Panel recommends that, before theSecurity Council agrees to implement a ceasefire orpeace agreement with a United Nations-ledpeacekeeping operation, the Council assure itself thatthe agreement meets threshold conditions, such asconsistency with international human rights standardsand practicability of specified tasks and timelines;

(b) The Security Council should leave in draftform resolutions authorizing missions with sizeabletroop levels until such time as the Secretary-Generalhas firm commitments of troops and other criticalmission support elements, including peace-buildingelements, from Member States;

(c) Security Council resolutions should meetthe requirements of peacekeeping operations when theydeploy into potentially dangerous situations, especiallythe need for a clear chain of command and unity ofeffort;

(d) The Secretariat must tell the SecurityCouncil what it needs to know, not what it wants tohear, when formulating or changing mission mandates,and countries that have committed military units to anoperation should have access to Secretariat briefings tothe Council on matters affecting the safety and securityof their personnel, especially those meetings withimplications for a mission’s use of force.

5. Information and strategic analysis: theSecretary-General should establish an entity, referredto here as the ECPS Information and Strategic AnalysisSecretariat (EISAS), which would support theinformation and analysis needs of all members ofECPS; for management purposes, it should beadministered by and report jointly to the heads of theDepartment of Political Affairs (DPA) and theDepartment of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO).

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6. Transitional civil administration: the Panelrecommends that the Secretary-General invite a panelof international legal experts, including individualswith experience in United Nations operations that havetransitional administration mandates, to evaluate thefeasibility and utility of developing an interim criminalcode, including any regional adaptations potentiallyrequired, for use by such operations pending the re-establishment of local rule of law and local lawenforcement capacity.

7. Determining deployment timelines: the UnitedNations should define “rapid and effective deploymentcapacities” as the ability, from an operationalperspective, to fully deploy traditional peacekeepingoperations within 30 days after the adoption of aSecurity Council resolution, and within 90 days in thecase of complex peacekeeping operations.

8. Mission leadership:

(a) The Secretary-General should systematizethe method of selecting mission leaders, beginningwith the compilation of a comprehensive list ofpotential representatives or special representatives ofthe Secretary-General, force commanders, civilianpolice commissioners, and their deputies and otherheads of substantive and administrative components,within a fair geographic and gender distribution andwith input from Member States;

(b) The entire leadership of a mission should beselected and assembled at Headquarters as early aspossible in order to enable their participation in keyaspects of the mission planning process, for briefingson the situation in the mission area and to meet andwork with their colleagues in mission leadership;

(c) The Secretariat should routinely provide themission leadership with strategic guidance and plansfor anticipating and overcoming challenges to mandateimplementation, and whenever possible shouldformulate such guidance and plans together with themission leadership.

9. Military personnel:

(a) Member States should be encouraged,where appropriate, to enter into partnerships with oneanother, within the context of the United NationsStandby Arrangements System (UNSAS), to formseveral coherent brigade-size forces, with necessaryenabling forces, ready for effective deployment within30 days of the adoption of a Security Council

resolution establishing a traditional peacekeepingoperation and within 90 days for complexpeacekeeping operations;

(b) The Secretary-General should be given theauthority to formally canvass Member Statesparticipating in UNSAS regarding their willingness tocontribute troops to a potential operation, once itappeared likely that a ceasefire accord or agreementenvisaging an implementing role for the UnitedNations, might be reached;

(c) The Secretariat should, as a standardpractice, send a team to confirm the preparedness ofeach potential troop contributor to meet the provisionsof the memoranda of understanding on the requisitetraining and equipment requirements, prior todeployment; those that do not meet the requirementsmust not deploy;

(d) The Panel recommends that a revolving“on-call list” of about 100 military officers be createdin UNSAS to be available on seven days’ notice toaugment nuclei of DPKO planners with teams trainedto create a mission headquarters for a newpeacekeeping operation.

10. Civilian police personnel:

(a) Member States are encouraged to eachestablish a national pool of civilian police officers thatwould be ready for deployment to United Nationspeace operations on short notice, within the context ofthe United Nations Standby Arrangements System;

(b) Member States are encouraged to enter intoregional training partnerships for civilian police in therespective national pools, to promote a common levelof preparedness in accordance with guidelines,standard operating procedures and performancestandards to be promulgated by the United Nations;

(c) Members States are encouraged to designatea single point of contact within their governmentalstructures for the provision of civilian police to UnitedNations peace operations;

(d) The Panel recommends that a revolvingon-call list of about 100 police officers and relatedexperts be created in UNSAS to be available on sevendays’ notice with teams trained to create the civilianpolice component of a new peacekeeping operation,train incoming personnel and give the componentgreater coherence at an early date;

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(e) The Panel recommends that parallelarrangements to recommendations (a), (b) and (c)above be established for judicial, penal, human rightsand other relevant specialists, who with specialistcivilian police will make up collegial “rule of law”teams.

11. Civilian specialists:

(a) The Secretariat should establish a centralInternet/Intranet-based roster of pre-selected civiliancandidates available to deploy to peace operations onshort notice. The field missions should be grantedaccess to and delegated authority to recruit candidatesfrom it, in accordance with guidelines on fairgeographic and gender distribution to be promulgatedby the Secretariat;

(b) The Field Service category of personnelshould be reformed to mirror the recurrent demandsfaced by all peace operations, especially at the mid- tosenior-levels in the administrative and logistics areas;

(c) Conditions of service for externallyrecruited civilian staff should be revised to enable theUnited Nations to attract the most highly qualifiedcandidates, and to then offer those who have servedwith distinction greater career prospects;

(d) DPKO should formulate a comprehensivestaffing strategy for peace operations, outlining, amongother issues, the use of United Nations Volunteers,standby arrangements for the provision of civilianpersonnel on 72 hours' notice to facilitate mission start-up, and the divisions of responsibility among themembers of the Executive Committee on Peace andSecurity for implementing that strategy.

12. Rapidly deployable capacity for publicinformation: additional resources should be devoted inmission budgets to public information and theassociated personnel and information technologyrequired to get an operation’s message out and buildeffective internal communications links.

13. Logistics support and expendituremanagement:

(a) The Secretariat should prepare a globallogistics support strategy to enable rapid and effectivemission deployment within the timelines proposed andcorresponding to planning assumptions established bythe substantive offices of DPKO;

(b) The General Assembly should authorize andapprove a one-time expenditure to maintain at leastfive mission start-up kits in Brindisi, which shouldinclude rapidly deployable communications equipment.These start-up kits should then be routinely replenishedwith funding from the assessed contributions to theoperations that drew on them;

(c) The Secretary-General should be givenauthority to draw up to US$50 million from thePeacekeeping Reserve Fund, once it became clear thatan operation was likely to be established, with theapproval of the Advisory Committee on Administrativeand Budgetary Questions (ACABQ) but prior to theadoption of a Security Council resolution;

(d) The Secretariat should undertake a reviewof the entire procurement policies and procedures (withproposals to the General Assembly for amendments tothe Financial Rules and Regulations, as required), tofacilitate in particular the rapid and full deployment ofan operation within the proposed timelines;

(e) The Secretariat should conduct a review ofthe policies and procedures governing the managementof financial resources in the field missions with a viewto providing field missions with much greaterflexibility in the management of their budgets;

(f) The Secretariat should increase the level ofprocurement authority delegated to the field missions(from $200,000 to as high as $1 million, depending onmission size and needs) for all goods and services thatare available locally and are not covered under systemscontracts or standing commercial services contracts.

14. Funding Headquarters support forpeacekeeping operations:

(a) The Panel recommends a substantialincrease in resources for Headquarters support ofpeacekeeping operations, and urges the Secretary-General to submit a proposal to the General Assemblyoutlining his requirements in full;

(b) Headquarters support for peacekeepingshould be treated as a core activity of the UnitedNations, and as such the majority of its resourcerequirements for this purpose should be funded throughthe mechanism of the regular biennial programmebudget of the Organization;

(c) Pending the preparation of the next regularbudget submission, the Panel recommends that the

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Secretary-General approach the General Assembly witha request for an emergency supplemental increase tothe Support Account to allow immediate recruitment ofadditional personnel, particularly in DPKO.

15. Integrated mission planning and support:Integrated Mission Task Forces (IMTFs), withmembers seconded from throughout the United Nationssystem, as necessary, should be the standard vehicle formission-specific planning and support. IMTFs shouldserve as the first point of contact for all such support,and IMTF leaders should have temporary line authorityover seconded personnel, in accordance withagreements between DPKO, DPA and othercontributing departments, programmes, funds andagencies.

16. Other structural adjustments in DPKO:

(a) The current Military and Civilian PoliceDivision should be restructured, moving the CivilianPolice Unit out of the military reporting chain.Consideration should be given to upgrading the rankand level of the Civilian Police Adviser;

(b) The Military Adviser’s Office in DPKOshould be restructured to correspond more closely tothe way in which the military field headquarters inUnited Nations peacekeeping operations are structured;

(c) A new unit should be established in DPKOand staffed with the relevant expertise for the provisionof advice on criminal law issues that are critical to theeffective use of civilian police in the United Nationspeace operations;

(d) The Under-Secretary-General forManagement should delegate authority andresponsibility for peacekeeping-related budgeting andprocurement functions to the Under-Secretary-Generalfor Peacekeeping Operations for a two-year trialperiod;

(e) The Lessons Learned Unit should besubstantially enhanced and moved into a revampedDPKO Office of Operations;

(f) Consideration should be given to increasingthe number of Assistant Secretaries-General in DPKOfrom two to three, with one of the three designated asthe “Principal Assistant Secretary-General” andfunctioning as the deputy to the Under-Secretary-General.

17. Operational support for public information: aunit for operational planning and support of publicinformation in peace operations should be established,either within DPKO or within a new Peace andSecurity Information Service in the Department ofPublic Information (DPI) reporting directly to theUnder-Secretary-General for Communication andPublic Information.

18. Peace-building support in the Department ofPolitical Affairs:

(a) The Panel supports the Secretariat’s effort tocreate a pilot Peace-building Unit within DPA, incooperation with other integral United Nationselements, and suggests that regular budgetary supportfor this unit be revisited by the membership if the pilotprogramme works well. This programme should beevaluated in the context of guidance the Panel hasprovided in paragraph 46 above, and if considered thebest available option for strengthening United Nationspeace-building capacity it should be presented to theSecretary-General within the context of the Panel’srecommendation contained in paragraph 47 (d) above;

(b) The Panel recommends that regular budgetresources for Electoral Assistance Divisionprogrammatic expenses be substantially increased tomeet the rapidly growing demand for its services, inlieu of voluntary contributions;

(c) To relieve demand on the FieldAdministration and Logistics Division (FALD) and theexecutive office of DPA, and to improve supportservices rendered to smaller political and peace-building field offices, the Panel recommends thatprocurement, logistics, staff recruitment and othersupport services for all such smaller, non-military fieldmissions be provided by the United Nations Office forProject Services (UNOPS).

19. Peace operations support in the Office of theUnited Nations High Commissioner for HumanRights: the Panel recommends substantially enhancingthe field mission planning and preparation capacity ofthe Office of the United Nations High Commissionerfor Human Rights, with funding partly from the regularbudget and partly from peace operations missionbudgets.

20. Peace operations and the information age:

(a) Headquarters peace and securitydepartments need a responsibility centre to devise and

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oversee the implementation of common informationtechnology strategy and training for peace operations,residing in EISAS. Mission counterparts to theresponsibility centre should also be appointed to servein the offices of the special representatives of theSecretary-General in complex peace operations tooversee the implementation of that strategy;

(b) EISAS, in cooperation with the InformationTechnology Services Division (ITSD), shouldimplement an enhanced peace operations element onthe current United Nations Intranet and link it to themissions through a Peace Operations Extranet (POE);

(c) Peace operations could benefit greatly frommore extensive use of geographic information systems(GIS) technology, which quickly integrates operationalinformation with electronic maps of the mission area,for applications as diverse as demobilization, civilianpolicing, voter registration, human rights monitoringand reconstruction;

(d) The IT needs of mission components withunique information technology needs, such as civilianpolice and human rights, should be anticipated and metmore consistently in mission planning andimplementation;

(e) The Panel encourages the development ofweb site co-management by Headquarters and the fieldmissions, in which Headquarters would maintainoversight but individual missions would have staffauthorized to produce and post web content thatconforms to basic presentational standards and policy.