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ECOSOC Substantive Session
Statement by Ambassador Betty King Thank you, Mr. President. Let me take the opportunity to thank Under Secretary-General Oshima for his presentation of the Secretary-General's interesting and comprehensive report. It is appropriate that the Secretary-general's report, and the theme of this ECOSOC Humanitarian Segment session, focus on coordination. Humanitarian response situations are becoming more complex than ever. The humanitarian community often has to deal with multiple crises : international conflict; ethnic, religious, or regional strife; drought and food shortages; natural disasters; health crises -the list goes on. In combination, these problems are beyond the mandate of individual international agencies, beyond the resources of bilateral donor response, beyond the capacities of the non-governmental community. Our experience in the past decade, since the adoption of General Assembly Resolution 46/182, has made it clear that coordination is the key enabling tool in humanitarian response. This is why the United States was a strong supporter of the creation of OCHA and the IASC as part of the Track II reform process in the UN, and why we remain strong supporters OCHA's coordination mandate and function. One of OCHA's real successes since its inception has been strengthening the Consolidated Appeal process. The Appeals themselves have steadily improved in quality, and the planning and consultation process behind them has deepened coordination in the field among UN, NGO and donors. However, to retain its usefulness, the CAP implementing and monitoring process should capture all of the resources being spent on humanitarian response, including NGO and bilateral humanitarian assistance. We should encourage the participation of NGOs in the CAP consultation process. The CAP might also be a means of linking relief to development. As Catherine Bertini so eloquently pointed out last week during the Operational Activities Segment, the effectiveness of humanitarian assistance is directly related to the ability to sustain its benefits. We need to improve capacity and willingness to link relief operations with host government efforts, building local capacity instead of creating unsustainable parallel institutions. Doing a better job at "relief-to-development" is a way of giving development a head start and preventing the recurrence of Conflict if development fails to take off. At the country level, there is room for improvement in the management of the humanitarian coordination system. We would like to see a greater willingness to replace resident coordinators when it is clear that changing situations demand different skills and backgrounds. There should be a roster of well-trained potential resident coordinators for humanitarian emergency situations. And we should consider the use of alternatives, such as lead agencies. Also, OCHA itself needs to have the surge capacity to support a coordinated UN response. We applaud OCHA's recent management reforms, which aim at improving surge capacity, and ask the Secretaty-General to take measures to ensure that OCHA personnel can be deployed rapidly to provide coordination assistance as changing circumstances demand. Internal displacement has become one of the characteristic humanitarian issues of our day. There are more internally displaced in the world than refugees who have crossed international borders. We would like to repeat and emphasize two points regarding internal displacement. First, the primary responsibility for assistance and protection of internally displaced persons rests with the host authority; and second, as ECOSOC recognized in its agreed conclusions in 1999, all states should apply internationally recognized norms with regard to internally displaced persons. In this regard we continue to support the work of the Secretary- General's Representative on Internally Displaced Persons specifically in his advocacy of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement as the normative standard for international treatment of internal displacement. Perhaps I the greatest impediment to the ability of the UN to protect I and assist vulnerable people who suffer internal displacement is lack of humanitarian access. The United States supports the role of the Emergency Relief Coordinator in negotiating improved access to vulnerable populations, including internally displaced populations, in order to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian assistance. We were pleased to see a major effort in improving the UN response to internal displacement --the Senior Inter-Agency Network on Internal Displacement. Network field studies -in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Burundi, Angola and Afghanistan confirmed the existence of serious gaps in assistance, in protection, and in the way the UN organizes to address IDP need. The U.S. supports the Secretary- General's intention to create a small, non-operational IDP office in OCHA to ensure a more coordinated response. We commend the IASC policy to integrate a gender perspective into humanitarian assistance: The U.S. agrees that women and girls in emergency situations have special vulnerabilities and needs. We thus support the mainstreaming of gender perspective in UN programming, and a focus on protection, reproductive health, nutrition and education in emergency situations. We would like to draw specific attention to the problem of sexual and gender based violence in emergency situations. Over the past three years the U.S. Government has been funding projects in the field for sexual and gender-based violence --projects that address preventive and primary health care, psycho-social and mental health care, sexual violence prevention, reproductive health and female genital mutilation. The U.S. also supports the growing attention being paid to the plight of children in humanitarian emergencies, especially practical steps that tangibly affect the quality of life of children. The appointment of Child Protection Advisers represents an important step toward operationalizing child protection throughout the UN response, both in peacekeeping and humanitarian missions. We would like to see an evaluation of the performance of the initial two appointments - Sierra Leone and DRC -and hear about planning for the appointment of such Advisers elsewhere. We also want to stress the importance of programs designed to reach children most at risk, especially child soldiers. The United States has a strong interest in the more effective sharing of information in emergencies. Disasters in general, regardless of cause, seem to be on the rise, increasing in frequency and intensity, placing more people and countries at risk and posing the threat of instability in entire regions. The US supports enhanced collaboration on disaster information sharing among the UN, the NGO community, and governments. We welcome the steps OCHA has taken if this area and encourage OCHA to explore further the usel of geographic information systems (GIS) data bases that incorporate both baseline and thematic data, including digital maps, imagery, and other geospatial products. The United States also supports OCHA's efforts to develop a universally accepted "standard" for response to natural disasters, including the ongoing negotiations on urban search,and rescue. We hope that,such procedures would establish much needed minimum guidelines for providing and accepting assistance in emergency natural disaster response and mitigation situations. We would like to reiterate the need, highlighted in the report, for strengthened national disaster management capacity for the development of disaster response coordination mechanisms, and for strong contingency planning at the national and regional levels, for both natural disasters and complex emergencies. Effective response begins at the national level, and it should involve non-governmental organizations and local actors. We agree with the emphasis placed by Mr. Oshima, Ms. Bertini and the Secretary-general on the safety and security of UN and humanitarian personnel. It surely is the moral responsibility of the organization to ensure the well-being of its staff, and we are confident that appropriate mechanisms can be worked out to enable the UN and its components to fulfill this vital responsibility. As I said last week, the U.S. condemns the killing of
the field security officer in Central African Republic and urges the
UN and appropriate authorities undertake a full investigation the
incident so that those responsible can be brought to justice. Now
that we know more about the personal dimensions of the tragedy, we
can see that it deeply affects a wide human family. Mr. President,
it is unacceptable that UN staff continue to be killed with impunity. |