 I'm delighted to welcome Jean-Pierre Lacroix, who, as you know, is the Under Secretary-General at the United Nations for Peace Operations. I briefly overlapped with Jean-Pierre when I was still there myself, but I know that he has a very close relationship with our Ambassador, Geraldine Bernaysen, and indeed, generally with Ireland. And I'm aware for my own background of the very close cooperation we've had with the Department, which the Under Secretary-General heads at the UN. Jean-Pierre Lacroix has had a very distinguished career at the senior levels of diplomatic and political life in France. He had different times. You've been Ambassador to Sweden. You've been Deputy Prime Representative at the French Mission to the UN. You've been Advisor in the Office of the Prime Minister, I know that. And you've been the head of the Department at the Kedocé in charge of the UN and international organizations. So from that, then, you came to your present position at the UN. And really for the very few in this room who are not initiators, I suspect everybody knows, it's one of the critically important jobs at the UN. I mean, all of us as ambassadors there could witness the impact that job has. The number of challenges that you face is absolutely overwhelming, whether it is the changing nature of the threats which have to be dealt with, the degree of consensus that exists or does not exist on UN interventions in those situations, the budgetary challenge, which in the last couple of years I suspect has become even more pressing than in the past. And then also the wider issue of integrating peacekeeping within the architecture of the UN and getting a better join-up with the other pillars. It's a priority, I know, for the present Secretary General. So plenty to talk about. And as usual at the IAEA, there is a practice of the Speaker's remarks being on the record, and after that the Q&A would be Chavenhouse Rules. I think there's probably nobody in this room who doesn't know Chavenhouse Rules. And so with that, Jean-Pierre, I give you the floor. Well, thank you very much. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. First of all, it's really a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. And also I would like to start by saying how happy I am to be here in Ireland, because I don't want to sort of be overly diplomatic, but sincerely, and you know, in all honesty, Ireland is a very solid, true, reliable partner for the UN in general. Commitment to multilateralism is something that suddenly we can use these days. But also, and more specifically, Ireland's commitment to peacekeeping. So I feel here that I'm speaking to an audience and to colleagues who are very well informed and versed into the reality of peacekeeping and also the challenges that we're currently facing. And I will address some of the challenges that we're facing because we're trying to find adequate responses to these challenges. But let me just start by saying that it's important to, first of all, to remember and recall the achievements of the UN when it comes to peacekeeping. And it's not only about the past and a number of countries that were held by peacekeeping operation in their return to stability. And the list is very long of these countries, but it's also about the current achievements in terms of protection of civilians. We have now protection of civilians as key priorities in many of our missions, particularly in Africa. And I think we protect every single day hundreds of thousands of people in different ways and sometimes really making the difference between life and death. Of course, we would like to do more and sometimes we don't do what we would want to do, but still the protection of civilians is, I think, an achievement of peacekeeping. And then the other achievement, which is also happening every day and not always very much on the radar screen, is the preventative role of peacekeeping. And here I have very much in mind what we call the traditional peacekeeping operation. There were mostly military people somehow along the ceasefire line or essentially tasked with monitoring a ceasefire and preventing any incident from escalating. And this is something that UNIFIL does on a daily basis. This is something that colleagues in Cyprus do. And I think it's important to highlight this because its prevention is what it is. When nothing happens, then no one has anything to talk about. But we know and you know because you have soldiers and staff in southern Lebanon and also on the Golan. There are incidents that occur every week, sometimes every day. And they might be very small, but if the blue helmets are not there to quickly de-escalate, then those incidents could very easily turn into a situation that would be out of control. And we never forget that we are dealing with parties that do not talk to each other and they don't recognize each other. They don't want to talk to each other. There's an exception in southern Lebanon because we facilitate some form of liaison between the Lebanese armed forces and the IDF. But still, so the preventative role, the protection of civilians and the fact that in many countries have been helped by peacekeeping. But at the same time, we have today challenges that are maybe not totally new but their magnitude is significant and also they have evolved in their nature because the nature of the conflicts we're dealing with has also evolved. And I think those challenges are essentially four. One is the fact that the political processes that we are supporting are usually moving very slowly or not moving at all. And this is a problem for us because I think it's quite clear that whatever the mandate, peace operations are there to support a political solution. That's really their key purpose. But if those political efforts are not succeeding, they're moving too slowly or not at all, then we don't have a prospect for exit. And there's a sentiment that then settles that we were there forever, we're stuck. And then there's an additional sentiment that sort of settles as well, which is you are failing. I mean, you've been in Cyprus for four years or 50 years and we don't have a political solution there. How come? So number one, of course, there are explanations to that. But I see this as a major challenge, especially at a time where the international community is divided and we cannot rely on a United Security Council, on a United international community, which would be in a better position to support political efforts. Now, the second challenge is the question of how dangerous or how much more dangerous the environment in which peace operation operate is, are today. We've had a higher number of fatalities in peacekeeping as a result of attacks against the blue helmets, but also against the humanitarian worker. Unfortunately, today or tonight, we had three colleagues from WHO who were killed in the eastern Congo because of the situation there and the tensions that arose as a result of a number of factors. But the reality is that the blue flag or the blue helmet do not protect anymore. And in some cases, unfortunately, they make you a target. And that is something to which we have to adapt and that it's very much as a result of the evolving nature of conflict, the fact that we're having to deal more and more with armed groups, criminal groups or terrorist groups or combination of those groups and those people have no interest in peace at all and they have, in many cases, they don't have much by political agenda. So how do you interact with them and for what? So that's the second challenge. The third challenge is the high number of vulnerable civilians in many of our peace operation settings and that makes protection of civilians a very key priority of our mandates, particularly in the big missions in Africa. And then against this backdrop, we have issues that have to do with preparedness. And I think part of it comes with the need to adjust from a traditional, quote-unquote, again, more kind of peaceful or maybe less challenging type of peacekeeping, although I, again, believe that even those traditional missions are challenging and sometimes dangerous. But it also comes from the fact that we have issues that have to do with training equipment. Performance assessment is something that we are working on as well. Mindset, again, mindset partly comes from this transition to a different kind of peacekeeping, et cetera, et cetera. So the problem with capacity and preparedness. So this is the determination that we made when Secretary General Antonio Guterres started his position in 2017. And the choice was made to share very candidly those challenges with the states and explain to them that we would be working on them and we would take action and remedial actions in many different areas. But at the same time, the key message was that we needed to work with them and we needed member states to help us because peacekeeping is quintessentially a partnership between member states and ourselves. Because our member states provide us with our mandates, our resources, financial resources, troop and police. And they can be also instrumental in helping us remedy the different issues and problems we have in many different areas. Training equipment and all this. So that was the approach that guided the action for peacekeeping initiative which is the sort of strategic framework against which we have taken a number of action. And the political momentum we got was when we shared a declaration of shared commitment with the member states and we invited them to sign on. And of course we had a few discussions with them to make sure that we would have as many signatories as possible. And we had many 152 member states which I think also was reflective of the fact that peacekeeping still benefits from a relatively high degree of support in the UN. As an activity, as a UN activity, so at least this is something on which we can build on and provide it that we are seen as taking action and being reactive in the face of all these challenges I think we can sustain this support. Within the action for peacekeeping initiative, we have essentially five or six key areas within which we work and we take a number of action. The first priority area is the political dimension. It is the most elusive and it is the subject on which it will be more difficult to come up with trends and numbers and diagrams and that would sort of somehow suggest impact or improvement, but at the same time, we want to make that as a top priority and a top item on our list because we, as I said, I mean we're about supporting political solutions but member states need to hear that message that they need to help us and they need to use and dedicate their energy and their influence to support in different ways those political efforts because we need them, we need the parties to be willing. The parties need to be encouraged and pressured if needed by those who can have an influence. We also need to work with regional, sub-regional organizations such as the African Union or any other EU of course. So that was the first item and the message was, work with us and please try to help unlock some of these stalled political processes. The second item is what I call the performance cluster. It's everything we need to do to improve performance and we launched a number of initiatives regarding the improvement of training both in terms of the scope of training but also the way in which training was provided with a couple of areas which we're putting the emphasis such as leadership training and the in-mission training teams to make sure that there will be refreshment and also that our team, particularly the leaders, will be getting this additional training when deployed. We have been also taking a number of initiatives and by the way, this is something that we need to fund on the basis of voluntary funding. Peacekeeping is finance through assessed contribution. There's a scale of assessment by which member states pay a certain percentage of the total budget of peace operation but we cannot fund some of the key activities like training or evaluation and many other areas with these peacekeeping budgets. So we call on, we rely on voluntary funding and that is true for the training plan that we launched and that is true for many of the other initiatives that we took to improve equipment gaps and to improve the preparedness. We had discovered that some of the units that were deployed were not evaluated enough in terms of their ability not only to be good peacekeepers but also in terms of their core ability to basically perform as a military or a police unit and we've developed enhanced pre-deployment visits. There's a whole series of new instrument that we have as well to assess performance of military units, police unit and performance of mission as a whole that is called the Comprehensive Police, Comprehensive Performance Assessment System and these are tools of course but we thought that we needed to have to be a bit more scientific when it comes to assessing what are different components do on the ground, how they perform. Even though we recognize that ultimately performance is also has a non sort of less mathematical aspect as well. We have been working a lot on medical support as well. Accountability, this is something that now we sort of systematically evaluate especially when we have incident where we think we've been failing particularly in protecting civilians and we systematically investigate and I think that there's a recognition with our troops and police contributing countries that we do this in a constructive spirit. We are very candid with them but we also recognize that in most cases there are also some problems and issues that have to do with our own organization and not only with the TCCs and PCC which is how we call them, our troops and police contributing countries but we've had many cases where by this through this very sort of candid interaction with them we've been able to talk about issues and remedy and see improvement which I think is really the way forward. So that's the performance cluster and there are many other aspects. One of them is to which Ireland has contributed a lot is the rolling out of a peace keeping intelligence policy which is critical because we need to have also a better situational awareness and better capacity to be aware of what goes on in the environment in which we operate and then be in a better position to preempt and prevent threats to us and to the population. The third aspect on which we're working a lot is having more women in peace keeping and also involving women more in political processes. These are the two branches of what we call the women peace and security agenda. You all know that there was a landmark resolution adopted by the Security Council 19 years ago. So next year will be 20 years ago sort of really launching this very important platform. Having more women in peace keeping, we see it as not really, it's about performance and it's not only about improving the work environment and making sure that we have a work environment in our peace operation that is more reflective of the diversity of the societies and communities in which we were active but it is also very important because we're interacting a lot with communities in peace keeping and Southern Lebanon is a case in point. We are quite many in that relatively small area and sometimes we're quite intrusive. So and this is a very populated area. So we have to build trust with the population. We have to make sure that they would accept us and we have to make sure they would understand what we do and why we're there. And the challenges are the same. They're probably even greater to some extent in some of our missions in Africa because they were talking about communities that are sometimes extremely traumatized and vulnerable because the activities of armed groups and gender based violence and atrocities really committed against those communities. And if we are to build trust and enable ourselves to be effective then we have to have women with us interacting with communities. Otherwise, if we come only with men in uniform and with weapon to groups that are traumatized and have been harassed by men with weapon maybe not necessarily with uniform then we know we won't be able to kind of trust that we need and that we also be a disadvantage when it comes to having a better situation of awareness, not to mention the role that we're trying to play regarding gender based violence and other type of atrocities against either women or children. So I think we're in a better position now because there's total awareness I think within the states and through the police contributing countries that we need to have more women and they themselves are increasing the number of women in their own national police force but it's still a work in progress with almost double the proportion of staff officers and military observers and police officers or individual police officers over the last two years but it's still low, it's went from seven or 8% to roughly 15% the form units it's lower but it is also on the upward trend and I think we've jumped to almost 1% in one year from 4.1 to 5% so that's not a lot but 1% is significant in our because we have 70,000 military and 10,000 police deployed so 1% of 70,000 is already something and can make a difference on the ground and we've recently appointed a Brigadier General from Ireland as you may know, General Morin O'Brien who's currently the acting force commander in UNBUFF and we are I think about to appoint another female general to another position we have a head of the UNFICIP force who's also a major general from Australia so we are getting there slowly and even on the top ranks and then the second part equally important is how to involve women more in political efforts and political processes which is I think a condition to make peace agreements and peace more sustainable and more accepted in other words, make sure that there would be a peace not only on paper but one that would be accepted and that would be really that would take hold in hearts and minds and be rooted in communities so this is also something that is there is some progress and particularly when we look at some of the provisions that you can see now in some of the peace agreements or some of the new constitution of conflict emerging from countries emerging from crisis but I think it's still not really something that is accepted and totally mainstream and the involvement of women is to me still is not systematic and tends to be a bit too much one shot here and there but not something that is sustained throughout a political process maybe a bit more at the local level because we do handle a lot of small local conflict and there I think our peacekeepers do a lot in terms of involving women so a few other issues and very briefly first of all everything that I mentioned here political efforts, performance, women in peacekeeping is about partnership because we cannot work on performance without partners not only the troop and police contributing countries but also those who can help and I know Ireland does training with other troop and police contributing country we also have partnership that we're trying to develop in order to feel some equipment gaps and we've recently had a few example where one country came to the support of another one deployed in the field to mitigate those equipment gaps of course partnership are absolutely critical when it comes to political efforts one example is how we work together with the African Union to bring about a peace agreement in the Central African Republic which we know we wouldn't have been able to do that if we had been working alone or if the African Union had been working alone and then the third dimension of partnership is on the ground because we need to have prioritized mandate and I think one thing that we hear a lot and you certainly remember that prioritized mandate for peacekeeping which I think is perfectly right but then prioritized mandates which I think should be about peace efforts protection of civilian capacity building that's really what we should focus on but then it means that others should do other things or should help us do what we do on these three areas and we see that we're working much more and we will be working more with partners on the ground with the EUETMs, the EU training mission that we have and Ireland is involved in those mission in Mali or Central African Republic there's one in Somalia as well and the World Bank Agency Funds on Programmes and all of this and I think the challenge is to make sure that we really bring where the input in the areas where we have the biggest added value and we also coordinate us in such a way as to avoid application and to really maximize our respective input, the reforms that were carried out at the initiative of the Secretary General then accepted that adopted by member states really aim at providing and promoting this more integrated way of working and I think by bringing closer together the Department of Peace operation the Department of Political Affairs by promoting a more integrated way of working with the Agency Funds on Programmes there is I think a new spirit, it's a work in progress all these different UN institutions have their own ways of working, their own tradition, mobility, we're talking about mobility it's very weak and sensible but I do think that we have some progress there and we've been working on a few situations where we are currently transiting from peacekeeping to another form of international support and Haiti that was the case and Darfur, it is currently the case so this also helps us sort of approach situation from the right angle which has to be a broad one and I keep insisting that in any situation which we are deployed as peace operation we should not look at that situation from the point of view of the angle of the peace operation, we should look at the situation from the point of view of what is it that we can and should do to make a difference and then what is our role as peace operation and what is the other's role that should complement our own activities in peacekeeping so finally just a word on improving conduct and discipline as well which has been a major issue not that the situation regarding sexual exploitation abuse was not more prevalent in peacekeeping than in any other branch of the United Nations system but it was certainly even more unacceptable so there was a lot that was done and very much because of the personal engagement of the Secretary General, I think we're in a better place now we have a much stronger reactivity by member state I think we also are more effective in learning about the allegation making sure that they're brought to our knowledge and I think we're also better in terms of supporting victims because we have now this new system with victims rights advocate in our big mission and we provide all kind of support to victims including when it comes to paternity claim but I think the number of allegation is decreasing in peacekeeping so that is a good sign on the other hand I think we're not at the hook I think that first of all there are still cases there are allegation many of these allegations are about all cases but still we have to deal with these cases and I see an issue in terms of the responsiveness of a few states regarding all cases I see a problem when it comes to making sure that all states will have the proper legislation to prosecute those responsible for these acts and I see a problem in terms of making sure that really all allegations will be brought to our knowledge and I think it's again we're improving there but I think it's a work in progress so just to wrap up I think the future of partnership will be very much about you see the future of peace operation will be very much about partnership I think that's quite clear in all aspects and we have this big operation today we're very much focusing on trying to improve the impact of these operations that are all challenged and operating in challenging environment and at the same time we have to think that way forward and I believe that there will be a further diversification of the ways and modalities in which the UN will act on the ground be deployed to promote peace because it is clear that peacekeeping can be a flexible instrument but it's not effective and it's not appropriate and adequate for any kind of situation and particularly when we talk about peace enforcement, counter-terrorism then peacekeeping is not the response so we have to then work to support other form of operation and this is why we're very supportive of strengthening the African Union capacity for their own operation and supporting initiatives such as the T5 Sahel I think this is a way forward this is not... it is complementary to what peacekeeping and even the robust peacekeeping can do but I think there has to be a line it's probably a blurred line but I think there has to be a line drawn between those different type of situation and the kind of responses that they call for and with this I thank you for your attention