WUNRN
http://www.aidsfreeworld.org/Newsroom/Press-Releases/2015/Code-Blue-Press-Release.aspx
CODE BLUE Campaign Launch for End to UN
Immunity when Peacekeepers Commit Sexual Exploitation & Abuse
—
AIDS-Free World’s Campaign Calls for Removal of Immunity and Commission of
Inquiry into UN’s Handling of Sexual Violence in Peacekeeping Missions —
New York, May 13, 2015 — Speaking just steps from UN
headquarters today, celebrated experts Ms. Graça Machel, Lt. Gen. Roméo
Dallaire, Ms. Theo Sowa, and Ambassador Anwarul Chowdhury joined international
advocacy organization AIDS-Free World to launch Code Blue, a campaign to end
immunity for sexual exploitation and abuse by UN peacekeepers.
Recent revelations of
child sexual abuse by French and other troops in the Central African Republic,
the UN’s documentation of those crimes, and its failure over the next year to
report the perpetrators or to protect the victims, are just the latest in a
shameful litany of tolerance for sexual abuse and subsequent UN cover-ups.
For more than two
decades, the media and non-governmental organizations have uncovered depraved
acts by UN peacekeepers, including human trafficking in Bosnia, sex-for-food
scandals in West Africa, and the rapes of women and children in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo. With each new exposé, the UN re-asserts its policy of
‘zero tolerance for sexual exploitation and abuse.’
In practice, the UN’s
zero tolerance policy amounts to zero justice for victims.
With Code Blue,
AIDS-Free World is determined to change that. As a first crucial step, it will
seek the removal of any possibility of immunity1 for
the UN’s own personnel—the UN’s non-military staff, police, and experts on
mission2 — when they are accused of sexual
exploitation or abuse, sending a powerful message to countries that supply
military peacekeepers. Code Blue will also call for the creation of an entirely
independent, external Commission of Inquiry to
examine every facet of sexual exploitation and abuse in peacekeeping
operations, and to investigate the way the UN system is handling the problem:
from its missions on the ground, right up through the chain of command to the
Secretary-General.
“UN immunity is a
protective cloak that allows peacekeepers to commit atrocities knowing how
unlikely it is that they will ever be stopped, investigated or punished for
their crimes,” said Paula Donovan, co-director of AIDS-Free World. “The
presumption that UN peacekeeping personnel may be immune from legal process
triggers a chain reaction that most often ends in gross miscarriages of
justice. Instead of prompting immediate action, reports of abuse are caught up
in a tangle of red tape while the Secretary-General decides whether to waive
immunity. Meanwhile, suspects and their accomplices have time to destroy
evidence, silence witnesses, and threaten or pay off victims or their families,
making justice virtually unattainable.”
The scale of sex abuse
among UN peacekeepers, both military and non-military, is shocking, and the
United Nations is well aware that it does not know the true extent of its own
problem. In a suppressed 2013 report3commissioned
by Ban Ki-moon, an Expert Team found that “the official numbers mask what
appears to be significant amounts of underreporting,” and that “UN personnel in
all the missions we visited could point to numerous suspected or quite visible
cases of [sexual exploitation and abuse] that are not being counted or
investigated.”
Among incidents that are
recorded, an appalling number of UN peacekeeper sexual exploitation and abuse
allegations are marked “unsubstantiated,” and cases are closed by the UN
because any evidence that might have led to a conviction has disappeared.
Sexual abusers among the UN’s staff, experts, and police remain within the
system, undetected, unpunished, and eligible for posting to the next
peacekeeping mission.
“When I released [the
landmark UN study] The Impact of Armed Conflict on
Children in 1996, we highlighted the rise of child sex abuse
associated with UN peacekeeping operations,” said Graça Machel. “At the time,
we found that the investigation and punishment of peacekeepers for sexual
exploitation and abuse was the exception rather than the rule. Nearly two
decades later, virtually nothing has changed. Nearly two decades later,
vulnerable women and children remain at unacceptable risk. Today a new chapter
begins."