The UN’s conflict prevention processes are in need of radical reform to ensure they start earlier, don’t merely react to existing crises, and take human rights fully into account, a UN human rights expert has said.
Current efforts to prevent conflict were “reactive, ineffective, often incoherent, and neither holistic nor strategic in preventing violence or avoiding recurrence”, and lacked any “significant links” to human rights, said the Special Rapporteur on transitional justice, Pablo de Greiff, presenting proposals for change to the UN General Assembly.
The proposals aim to contribute to the debate on how the UN can work more effectively to prevent conflict and other gross violations, declared by the Secretary-General to be the priority for the organization.
“Prevention is not a form of crisis response. It goes much further than early warning efforts,” de Greiff said. “There are good reasons to make sure that countries on the brink of violent conflict do not fall off that particular cliff. If an ‘early warning’ system has been triggered, it shows that prevention work has started (far) too late.”
Prevention work needed a wider focus and had to be brought into processes earlier, said the Special Rapporteur, according to a message UNB received from New York.
“We live in critical times – times which do not allow the United Nations any longer to think and act primarily from an inner perspective,” he said, highlighting that it was crucial to add substance and meaningful content to the work of preventing violence.
He said, none of the efforts thus far illustrate what prevention would mean in terms of content; none puts flesh on the bones of the links between prevention and human rights.
The fragmentation of knowledge was one of the main problems to be tackled, and processes such as forming States, institutional reforms to strengthen judicial independence, or establishing civilian oversight over security forces or changes in policing strategies all had to be thought of as “preventative tools”, which was not currently the case, the expert stressed.
“A comprehensive framework provides incentives to break down some of the barriers that have constrained prevention work,” the Special Rapporteur said.
“We should stop talking abstractly about links between prevention, human rights, and sustainable peace without having some concrete notion of what these involve.”
