UNaccountable: A New Approach to Peacekeepers and Sexual Abuse

Abstract

The appointment of a new United Nations (UN) Secretary-General brings new opportunities to address issues that have beset the organization over recent decades. A priority in that regard should be accountability for harms caused within peacekeeping. This issue has received significant attention over recent years, with the close scrutiny of cholera in Haiti and lead poisoning in Kosovo being just two examples. While legal scholarship in recent years has focused on how to reform UN accountability, particularly in relation to the Haiti cholera claims, there have been fewer proposals on how to address crimes committed by UN peacekeepers. One of the most serious of those crimes, in terms of harms caused both to victims and to the legitimacy of UN peacekeeping operations, is sexual abuse. Yet the proposals for addressing this issue largely have not been successful. To that end, this article-which is exploratory in nature-sets out why there is a need for a wholesale reform of how we approach accountability for peacekeepers who perpetrate sexual abuse, explaining particularly how the problems relate to laws and normative frameworks as well as to investigations and prosecutions. The article then proposes elements that might be considered in a new victim-centred approach-namely, criminal justice, truth and reconciliation, human rights and political processes.