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(UN Photo / Isaac Billy)

(UN Photo / Isaac Billy)

 

Jane Connors and the Failure of the UN’s Victims’ Rights Approach

Guest post by Maggie Arai
@MagsArai

In a February 2020 article for the Australian Journal of Human Rights, Jane Connors, the UN’s Victims’ Rights Advocate, unwittingly shines a glaring spotlight on the work the United Nations has yet to do in addressing sexual exploitation and abuse by UN personnel. Ms. Connors most likely intends to celebrate the UN's progress on this issue, but instead she winds up highlighting the UN’s relentless focus on public relations gestures and its unwillingness to admit culpability—two institutional positions that have allowed the UN’s sex abuse crisis to continue.

Refusing to Admit That There Is a Crisis

Ms. Connors prefaces her discussion of what the UN describes as its “victims’ rights approach” by explaining that “United Nations activities … have been undermined by the alleged sexual exploitation and abuse of women, men and children in extremely vulnerable situations… .” Her use of the word “alleged” suggests, bizarrely, that the crisis may or may not be founded in reality. Although Secretaries-General (including Kofi Annan, Ban Ki-moon, and Antonio Guterres) have done so for decades, Ms. Connors seems uncomfortable admitting the most basic of facts: that there is a clear and widespread crisis of United Nations personnel committing sexual exploitation, abuse, and harassment. 

Throughout the article, Ms. Connors refers to serious incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse as “allegations,” even when claims were, as she admits, investigated and substantiated by the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS). She chooses to ignore the 10-year span from 2004 to 2014, saying of this decade that "for a time, the number of reports of allegations decreased." In fact, the 2004 Report of the Secretary-General on Special measures for protection from sexual exploitation and sexual abuse cites a “deeply troubling” increase in allegations. In January of 2005, Secretary-General Kofi Annan was forced to admit that UN personnel had sexually exploited and abused refugees in the DRC, after a classified UN report of approximately 150 allegations of pedophilia, rape, and prostitution was released. An article from 2007 questions why, of the 319 UN personnel investigated for sexual misconduct over the previous 3 years, none appeared to have been prosecuted. The 2010 Special Measures report states, “a cause for continued concern is the increase in the number of allegations of the most egregious forms of sexual exploitation and abuse, namely, incidents involving minors, including rape.” The list goes on. It is clear that this decade was not a period of success for the UN, so it is baffling that Ms. Connors chooses to skip over it—and even more baffling that she alleges that reports of allegations decreased, when the UN’s own Special Measures reports offer evidence directly to the contrary.

Deflecting Blame

Ms. Connors is quick to remind the reader that the UN is not the only organization with charges against its personnel. She writes that “similar allegations against people working in charities and other organizations delivering humanitarian and development aid gained international attention” in 2018. In this, she is following the party line that has been used by Jane Holl Lute, the UN’s Special Coordinator on Improving the United Nations’ Response to Sexual Exploitation and Abuse: UN Peacekeeping does not have any particular issue of sexual assault, because sexual assault occurs outside of the UN as well. That twisted logic becomes a pattern throughout the article, with Ms. Connors being quick to point out that it was third parties who were under investigation, or that it was predominantly “non-United Nations forces authorized by the Security Council” who were exchanging food and money for sex with children. 

This focus on sexual abuse committed by personnel in non-UN entities makes it clear that preserving the UN’s reputation is Ms. Connors’ top priority. Further, it is an illegitimate comparison. The UN stands alone in that it has total immunity from legal process, making it wholly unlike the “charities and other organizations” that she mentions. When UN personnel commit an act of sexual abuse, they are generally shielded from facing criminal accountability by UN immunity. Suggesting that cases that include this unique legal issue, which affects the UN alone, are comparable to cases of sexual abuse within organizations not protected by immunity is deliberately misleading. 

Applying Cosmetic Fixes

Ms. Connors cites several specific cases of sexual exploitation and abuse, yet provides no follow-up information on what happened in any of those cases. Instead, she introduces the UN’s favorite decoy—the high-level plan of action. Or in this case, a “Task Force to develop a Plan of Action.” (The completed IASC Plan of Action can be read in full here). What happened to the victims and the perpetrators of confirmed cases of sexual exploitation and abuse? What did the Plan of Action accomplish? Ms. Connors does not say. Instead, she tells the reader that the ultimate Plan of Action includes six core principles “aimed at creating an environment free of sexual exploitation and abuse in humanitarian crises.” If you, as a reader, feel hard-pressed to know what to do with this information, you are not alone. 

The UN’s Special Measures reports, which have been released annually by the Secretary-General since 2004, have in Ms. Connors’ view “showcased a number of policy and programmatic prevention and response actions, which have been and continue to be robustly implemented across the United Nations system.” What Ms. Connors considers “robust” about the implementation of these “actions” remains unexplained. I reviewed all of the past Special Measures reports and could find no evidence that concrete actions to address the systemic problems facing the UN are being “robustly implemented.” The Code Blue Campaign, where I work as a legal fellow, has made it clear that words are used as a substitute for action in its reviews of the latest Special Measures reports. 

Focusing on Victims’ Rights in Title Alone

“Giving visibility and a voice to victims quickly emerged as the priority for me,” Ms. Connors writes of her appointment as the UN’s Victims’ Rights Advocate. Yet victims were conspicuously absent from the list of stakeholders Ms. Connors says she consulted at the outset of her appointment “to raise awareness of the role and gain an insight into their understanding of victims’ rights and a victims’ rights approach.” Ms. Connors may have listened to a few victims’ complaints, but by not indicating how those complaints have been concretely addressed, she again entirely misses the mark. Consulting with various stakeholders, none of whom are victims, on a “victims’ rights approach” is an excellent illustration of Ms. Connors’ priorities, and her lack of interest in what victims truly want. 

Ms. Connors goes on to describe discussions she convened in 2018 to create a Victim’s Statement (again, these discussions were with UN colleagues, not with victims themselves). As of today, that “statement” remains pending. The United Nations does not accept any responsibility towards its victims, and has never codified what victims of UN sexual exploitation and abuse are entitled to demand. Instead, the Organization has raised a few hundred thousand dollars each year for a voluntary Trust Fund in Support of Victims of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, distributed that meagre amount at random to community-based organizations rather than to individual victims, and expects those efforts to be applauded. 

Ms. Connors’ article, much like the Special Measures reports, names Victims’ Assistance Tracking Systems, Comprehensive Strategies, mapping exercises, and plans of action as indicators of progress. It fails to provide anything in the realm of concrete, data-driven results, but its primary failure is that it mistakes processes for progress. Having processes in place cannot be an indicator of progress when victims are not visible in any of these processes, and their voices cannot be heard. There’s no evidence that the listed meetings and documents have improved the UN’s crisis—but perhaps their intended purpose is to improve the damage to the UN’s reputation. 

Conclusion

Ms. Connors cites criticism by the Code Blue Campaign in her concluding paragraph: “inevitably, this approach has been criticized (Code Blue 2018).” However, she does nothing to address the concerns raised in that criticism. And of course, criticism is not inevitable. But dismissing all critical analysis as par for the course does make failure more inevitable. 

That Ms. Connors is comfortable titling her article “a victims’ rights approach” when the article avoids any meaningful discussion of victims' rights is illustrative of the UN’s greatest liability when it comes to addressing sexual exploitation and abuse: it is interested above all in protecting its own reputation. Though the UN makes public claims of its commitment to, and intentions for, ending UN sexual exploitation and abuse, it rarely follows through on these commitments. Ms. Connors adheres to the institutional line. She refuses to admit the extent of the crisis; deflects blame; and praises cosmetic fixes that, while useful from a public relations standpoint, do not hold up under scrutiny. 

Whatever the reasons for the ineffectiveness of UN Victims’ Rights Advocates, they do not start and end with Ms. Connors, but with a system uninterested in genuine reform. The UN, for its part, is most comfortable promoting and placing in power those who will not question the bureaucracy, criticize outdated methods of addressing its sexual exploitation and abuse crisis, or demand radically different solutions instead of ineffective “action plans.” Ms. Connors offers proof with this article that she is the perfect candidate for her role. 

Maggie Arai is the Code Blue Campaign’s Summer Legal Fellow. She is a second-year law student at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. 

 
 

(UN Photo / Mark Garten)

(UN Photo / Mark Garten)

 

100 Years of Sexism in the United Nations

By Izzy Tod
@IsabelleTod

Last week marked 100 years since the League of Nations, parent to the United Nations, was founded at the 1920 Paris Peace Conference. The week also marked 100 years of women being overlooked, harassed and even abused by an organisation that is supposed to protect them.

The League of Nations was created in order to bring about world peace through international collaboration in the aftermath of the First World War. With the second outbreak of war in 1939, the League (having failed in their most salient objective) was dissolved, to be replaced by the United Nations in 1945. The UN was a new and improved intergovernmental organisation that had a renewed commitment to global peace, that had learned from the failures of its predecessor, and that was empowered to tackle the problems of the late 20th century with gumption, idealism, and cooperation. The picture is a rosy one. But where do women fit in?

In the early days of the League of Nations, women at the Inter-Allied Women’s Conference were granted a small platform upon which they could lobby on matters relating directly to women and children, such as child trafficking and labour regulations. Sir Eric Drumond, the League’s first Secretary-General, stated: ‘I have always told anyone who asked me that I felt the more help we could receive from women the better’. This sentiment was translated into the League’s charter, which permitted women to work for the League in all capacities and to be treated equally in terms of hiring, promotions, and dismissals – an immensely progressive target at the time. As of 1925, there were 245 women working for the League. Whilst they were predominantly employed as secretaries and assistants, the League of Nations was not off to a bad start. 

When the turn came for the United Nations 25 years later, the status of women in the organisation once again became a point of contention. Of the 850 delegates who signed the first official charter of the United Nations at the San Francisco conference in 1945, only 4 were women. This would come as a huge disappointment for those who had been encouraged by the egalitarian promise of the League of Nations. Although this figure is underwhelming, SOAS University of London carried out a study into the unrecognised contributions of Latin American women at the foundation of the UN. Bertha Lutz, a Brazilian advocate for women’s rights, fought tirelessly alongside other female delegates from the Global South for the phrase ‘equal rights of men and women’ to be included in the preamble to the UN charter. Without this addition, the UN would have been left without a mandate to protect women’s rights. Unfortunately, this was a battle they fought without the support of other female delegates from Western Nations: the British representative Ellen Wilkinson argued that equality had already been reached, proven by her own high-ranking position in international politics, and the American delegate, Virginia Gildersleeve, is quoted as calling the inclusion of women in the charter ‘a vulgar thing to do’. Despite the incredible work that was done by Lutz, her achievements are still underplayed and sidelined by the UN in favour of a westernised narrative. Contrastingly, Eleanor Roosevelt remains plastered across the internet as a pioneer for universal human rights. However, a Google search for Bertha Lutz’s name produces next to no content produced by the UN in recognition of her contributions. A search of her name on their website yields only 590 results, compared to Wilkinson’s, which produces 7983, and Gildersleeve, whose name appears 3795 times. The UN is supposed to be an intersectional platform for all women around the world, but the disappearance of Bertha Lutz demonstrates its failure to amplify and celebrate the voices most in need of being heard. 

Moving onto the United Nations as we know it today and the familiar question of gender parity: Whilst the UN has achieved an equal number of men and women working at the two lowest levels of responsibility, this does not extend to the upper levels, and the organisation is not expected to achieve full parity for the next 112 years if current trends are maintained. For example, out of the 193 member states of the United Nations, only 50 countries are currently represented by women at the UN General Assembly; even then, the countries represented by women are predominantly Western nations. Delegations such as Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and Iraq have never sent a female delegate. There is only one woman currently sitting on the Security Council, Joanna Wronecka, who is representing Poland. This is a huge drop from 2014, which saw 6 women take up seats on the council. The top position at the United Nations, the Secretary-General, has never been filled by a woman. In 2016, the possibility of a female Secretary-General seemed finally within reach as seven of the thirteen candidates put forward were women. The former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon even admitted that it was ‘high time now’ for a woman to take over the position. Antonio Guterres was given the post instead and the highly qualified women of the UN sat back down in their assigned seats to prepare for 5 more years of masculine administration. 

But why is it that women are unequally represented in the top positions of an organisation that is supposed to be dedicated to the promotion of gender equality? Some suggest it is because the UN is still a private gentleman’s club with a culture of bullying, backroom deals, and impunity. This creates an environment that is either consciously or unconsciously hostile to women. It will come as no surprise that this toxic masculine climate comes hand in hand with cases of sexual harassment in the workplace. The Guardian reported that one in three UN workers claim to have been sexually harassed between 2017 and 2019, mainly in the form of offensive jokes (22%), offensive remarks about appearance (14%) and conversations relating to sexual matters (13%). The most recent case that hit the headlines was that of Michel Sidibe, who stepped down from his position as Executive Director of UNAIDS in May 2019 after an independent panel found him to be creating ‘a patriarchal culture tolerating harassment and abuse of authority’. The panel’s report took particular issue with his choice to protect his deputy, Luiz Loures, who was accused of sexual assault by an employee, Martina Brostrom. The reprehensible findings of the panel did not, however, stop Sidibe from being celebrated as 'a true champion for a people-centred approach to health and development' by a UNAIDS press release following his departure. This surely begs the question: If the UN itself is not meeting the bare minimum standard of equality and safeguarding in its own workplace, what authority does it have to preach female empowerment to anyone else?

Due to the nature of the UN as a global organisation, its inaction on structural sexism does not simply affect those stationed at its headquarters in New York and other major centres, but spreads across borders, ethnicities and socio-economic classes. Through peacekeeping missions, the UN interacts with women who are in incredibly vulnerable positions due to adverse circumstances beyond their control. It is these women, who are the most in need of the support of the UN, who are the most let down. Take Haiti, for example, which was home to the longest-running peacekeeping mission in UN history, MINUSTAH, which ran from 2004-2017, to be replaced by the MINUJUSTH mission in 2018. From 2004 to 2007, 114 Sri Lankan peacekeeping troops were found to be running a child abuse ring while stationed in Haiti. Instead of prosecution, the troops were simply repatriated and are still yet to receive a conviction. More recently, a study was conducted by the University of Birmingham and Queen’s University interviewing 2500 Haitians who lived near the peacekeeper base throughout the MINUSTAH mission from 2004-2017. Unprompted, 10% of respondents mentioned that there were hundreds of children who had been fathered and abandoned by UN peacekeepers. Throughout the mission, women and girls would have transactional sex with peacekeepers in exchange for a meal or a handful of change. The practice was so common that the Haitian people even coined a term for the illegitimate children of UN peacekeepers: ‘Petit Minustah’. Young women were targeted as easy prey and trapped in a perpetual cycle of poverty by the UN, who withheld any access to child support. 

The MINUSTAH mission is not even an isolated incident. In 1994, Italian personnel of the UN were found to be paying girls aged 12-18 for sex while stationed in Mozambique. In Bosnia in 1999, women who were the victims of sex trafficking were sexually exploited by the UN contractors instead of being helped. In the Congo in 2005, troops were found to be offering food and money for sex with girls as young as 13. In 2014, it was revealed that French troops had been sexually abusing children in what the UN eventually admitted was a ‘gross institutional failure’ in the Central African Republic. Despite this horrific pattern of sexual exploitation and abuse dating up to the present day, the UN’s response has always remained more or less the same. The offending officers are repatriated, the blame is directed at their country of origin, the case is squashed, and the affected women are abandoned. Whilst Guterres, the current Secretary-General, claims to hold sexual exploitation and abuse as a top priority, the UN's tradition of shielding its personnel through the cloak of immunity calls into question its true dedication to the elimination of violence against women and gender-based inequality. Women who have been affected by poverty, war and natural disaster are being trampled on yet again by the seismic foot of the United Nations while guilty male troops get away without a scratch. If this is what the UN means by ‘peacekeeping’, the status of women, in the eyes of the organisation, cannot be anything but secondary to men. 

This is not to say that the UN fails women in all aspects of its work. The United Nations, and particularly the sub-organisation UN Women, have undoubtedly achieved huge steps forward for female empowerment, education and reproductive rights all across the globe. There is no need to undersell this achievement or belittle those who have worked so hard for the cause. But there is a need for conversation. Is the UN’s impact on women’s lives around the world always a net-positive one, and what can be done to make it so? It is certainly not a conversation the UN will instigate itself. Being the most senior inter-governmental organisation in the world comes with its privileges. Chiefly, the UN has no one to hold it to account. The Office of Internal Oversight Services, the UN Secretariat’s internal investigative office, is precisely that, internal. Benefitting from absolute immunity from legal process, the UN has no compelling obligation beyond that which it sets itself to dispel the stench of misogyny that has been lingering for the last hundred years. Even so, to some, the idea of denouncing the UN is borderline heretic and the argument could well be raised that since the UN is a force for immense good, it is counter-productive or even reckless to attack it for occasional shortcomings. But the UN is not infallible and surely it is more reckless to let it continue its downwards spiral unchecked. No one is exempt from fair criticism, particularly when such criticism is so vital to ensuring the protection of vulnerable women and girls around the world. 

Although Donald Trump’s Twitter account is scarcely home to insightful commentary on international affairs, his tweet from 2016 is startlingly true to mark: ‘The United Nations has such great potential but right now it is just a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time. So sad!’. The UN, while it is still an exclusive private gentleman’s club, will never be a place that takes its own chauvinism seriously if it is more advantageous not to. If the UN is going to change, it must be through drastic overhaul of legal structures that have for too long enabled systemic impunity for UN personnel. Thanks to the active work being done by AIDS-Free World's Code Blue Campaign, the future does look hopeful. Since 2015, the Code Blue Campaign have been lobbying to end UN personnel’s legal immunity for cases of sexual misconduct, to create an independent oversight panel that can hold the UN accountable, and to implement a special court mechanism in order to provide justice for those unable to access it. This is the direction in which the UN must travel as we move into the next 100 years of intergovernmental collaboration. 

We are so fortunate to have spent the last 100 years with an international organisation that is dedicated to the preservation of human life, but women are not the price to be paid for world peace.

Izzy Tod is studying towards an undergraduate degree in French at Wadham College at the University of Oxford, where she also works as Deputy Editor of Features for Cherwell, Oxford's independent student newspaper. 

 
 

(Photo: CNN)

(Photo: CNN)

 

A Case of Retaliation

The Truth about UNAIDS and its Campaign Against Martina Brostrom

December 19, 2019

By Sharanya Kanikkannan
@sharanyakkn

In 2015, Martina Brostrom alleged that she was sexually assaulted by Luiz Loures, then-Deputy Executive Director of UNAIDS.

A shoddy UN investigation rife with conflicts of interest concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prove the claim, even while another victim came forward publicly to allege sexual assault by Loures.

Brostrom was then put on the defensive as UNAIDS doubled down on an investigation into her and her now-husband. The final report claimed wrongdoing, focusing largely on her consensual workplace relationship, and revealing a disturbing, almost prurient focus on her personal sex life, all to arrive at the accusation of “sexual misconduct.” Who orchestrated the retaliatory investigation and covertly hacked into Brostrom’s partner’s emails in search of something to pin on her partner? The answer is Luiz Loures, who was aided by subordinates who may or may not have felt pressured to assist in their boss’s vigilante efforts. 

Attacking the credibility of a victim of sexual assault and harassment by denouncing her personal sex life is a tried-and-true bully’s technique, one adopted by the worst defense attorneys. Brostrom refused to stay silent. She called out this behavior for what it really is: retaliation.

In response to Brostrom’s claims, UNAIDS alleged that “an independent investigation proved beyond reasonable doubt” that Brostrom herself had committed misconduct.

Let's examine that.

First, no “independent investigation” was conducted. UNAIDS’ own internal investigative body was forced to recuse itself from looking into the specious claims against Brostrom. Then, UNAIDS hired and paid 89,000 Swiss francs for a private firm to review old documents and interviews and form a conclusion based on UNAIDS' instructions. They never even interviewed Brostrom.

Second, “beyond a reasonable doubt" is not a civil standard; the fact that UNAIDS makes such a claim about the strength of the “evidence” against Brostrom is not just a matter of semantics. It’s indicative of a long-running problem. UNAIDS puts soundbites over facts. Legal-sounding words have no meaning in a UN press release.

This response alone wasn’t enough, however, and the spokesperson for UNAIDS went on to state: “Any claims of retaliation are baseless and misleading.” This is the final nail in the coffin for credibility. No investigation has taken place into Brostrom’s claim of retaliation. The overblown charges against her, the continuous harassment of her while she’s on qualified medical leave, the public maligning of her reputation and character—all of it constitutes an institutional effort to send a message to victims: Stay in line.

If the UN wanted to take positive action, it should call for a truly independent, external, entirely unbiased investigation carried out by people with no allegiances or patronage to UN senior officials. The investigation should review the entire case including the original assault, UNAIDS' allegations against Brostrom, and Brostrom's claims of retaliation.

Since no such investigation has taken place, the default assumption must be to trust Brostrom’s claims, given that the report of an Independent Expert Panel last year warned that UNAIDS has no effective safeguarding procedures to prevent retaliation, and that the entity is rife with abuse of authority. Retaliation is all but inevitable in such an environment, and we must not allow UNAIDS to shrug off its burden to prove otherwise; dismissing a claim as “baseless” does not make it so.

We are witnessing the conclusion of an old vendetta, a continuation of what the Independent Expert Panel called UNAIDS’ culture of "nothing to see here."

Sharanya Kanikkannan is Legal and Policy Adviser for AIDS-Free World and its Code Blue Campaign.

 

(UN Photo / Marco Dormino)

(UN Photo / Marco Dormino)

 

Academic Study Predicts that Soldiers Who Abuse at Home Will Abuse on UN Peacekeeping Missions

December 2, 2019

By Emma Schwartz 
@emma_schwartz2

The Code Blue Campaign has been calling for the UN to remove Burundian soldiers serving in the UN peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic (CAR). We argue that the alleged crimes against humanity, including rape, committed with impunity by Burundian forces within Burundi—as affirmed by the International Criminal Court and the UN Commission of Inquiry on Burundi—endanger women and children in CAR, who are counting on the Burundians for protection not predation. 

A new study adds ballast to our case. 

Published in International Studies Quarterly in August 2019, “The Relationship between Contributors’ Domestic Abuses and Peacekeeper Misconduct in United Nations Peacekeeping Operations” argues that systemic abuse on the part of troop-contributing countries (TCCs) toward their own populations “strongly and consistently” predicts high levels of misconduct by a country’s soldiers when deployed on UN missions. In the study, authors Cale Horne, Kellan Robinson, and Megan Lloyd examine a range of offenses, including sexual exploitation and abuse, committed by UN military peacekeepers between 2009 and 2016. They find support for their hypothesis that “the behavior of military forces in their own countries should easily predict their behavior when deployed as part of UN PKOs [peacekeeping operations], which are typically set in fragile, post-conflict countries where civilians have minimal protections or legal recourse.” In short, the authors find that “bad behavior at home predicts bad behavior on mission.”

In explaining this correlation, the authors conjecture that “systems where military forces are engaged in regular misconduct … seek to recruit individuals amenable to these behaviors,” while individuals who are “drawn to opportunities for unaccountable violence … seek entry into states’ security services in places where a uniform offers these rewards.” This implies that a “lack of education about what constitutes abuse is not the main source of misconduct among peacekeepers, and preemptive or remedial training may not be the answer to the problem of misconduct.” This finding lends credence to Code Blue’s long-held belief that the UN’s continued focus on pre-deployment training and education is merely a cosmetic response; instead, a complete reevaluation and codification of what disqualifies a country from becoming or remaining a TCC is necessary.

To improve the “bad behavior at home”—and therefore on mission—of military peacekeeping contingents, the authors suggest that the UN and major PKO funders “invest in security-sector reform [SSR] in TCCs where physical integrity violations are common.” In Burundi, SSR efforts have been led by the UN Integrated Office in Burundi (BINUB)—mandated by Security Council Resolution 1719 of 2006)—as well as the Burundi-Netherlands Security Sector Development Programme (established in 2009). While these programs achieved notable results, including increased transparency and oversight of the security sector, progress halted with the election of President Pierre Nkurunziza. For example, in March 2019, the UN announced that the Burundian government has forced the closure of the country’s UN Human Rights Office, which had worked on SSR. Similarly, the Burundi-Netherlands Security Development Programme was phased out after the 2015 crisis sparked by President Nkurunziza’s repressive actions, and was closed completely in 2017. It is therefore evident that, while SSR can lead to positive changes, the current situation in Burundi will not allow for it.

Further, promoting TCCs’ “good behavior” on missions is already the subject of UN Security Council Resolution 2272, in which the Security Council “requests”—but does not require—that the Secretary-General repatriate military peacekeeping contingents widely accused of committing sexual exploitation and abuse. This is not enough. Instead, in my view, the UN must address the correlation between “bad behavior at home” and “bad behavior on mission” by increasing standards for TCC participation in peacekeeping and by codifying the list of circumstances under which a TCC may be removed from peacekeeping. Countries like Burundi should not be paid to contribute troops to UN missions until behavior at home reflects the UN’s ideal for the behavior of peacekeepers.

Emma Schwartz is Research Assistant for AIDS-Free World’s Code Blue Campaign. She is currently completing a master’s degree in Global Affairs at the University of Toronto’s Munk School.