Sumario: July 12, 2005: EU Presidency Statement on Follow up to the General Assembly Resolution 59/250 on the Triennial Comprehensive Policy Review of Operational Activities for Development of the United Nations System, delivered by the United Kingdom Mission to the UN on behalf of the European Union at ECOSOC 2005 OPERATIONAL ACTIVITIES SEGMENT (New York)
I have the honour to speak on behalf of the European Union. The Acceding Countries Bulgaria and Romania, the Candidate Countries Turkey and Croatia,* the Countries of the Stabilisation and Association Process and potential candidates, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, ,the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro as well as Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova, align themselves with this statement.
Mr President,
The European Union appreciates the work the United Nations Secretariat and United Nations Development Group Office have done preparing the reports for this meeting. They are important reminders of the landmark agreement last December of the TCPR - Triennial Comprehensive Policy Review of Operational Activities for Development of the United Nations system (GA 59/250) - and the challenges that lie ahead.
In a little over two months our heads of state and government will review progress against the commitments in the Millennium Declaration and the outcomes of the major UN conferences and summits. We will take bold decisions to achieve development, security and human rights for all underpinned by an ambitious agenda to strengthen the United Nations so that it can play a central role in achieving these goals. Whilst there are many facets of UN reform being discussed, for the people of developing
countries, few can be more important than ensuring they get the best value from the UN development system. This is why the TCPR is so important and why we now need to make it happen - rapid, system wide implementation should be prioritised and energised.
The European Union is strongly committed to the implementation of the TCPR resolution in its entirety. It is the core text that guides the United Nations and all member states in ensuring that the operational activities of the United Nations development system at country level respond to national development plans, policies and priorities, designed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. We are delighted that good progress has been made during the first six months. For example, we applaud
the UNDG for becoming signatories to the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in March this year.
Mr President,
The views of the EU on UN development system reform at the country level are well known so I will only briefly repeat them here. We consider that the UN should operate as one team under the leadership of the Resident Co-ordinator. In line with the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness - which we note has already been endorsed by 90 developed and developing countries - UN country teams should ensure alignment of UN agency programmes with comprehensive national development strategies reflecting
developing country priorities and further harmonised with bilateral donors. The UN Development Assistance Framework should be the mechanism for UN alignment with national strategies; the UNDAF Results Matrix should provide the means by which the UN's contribution to these strategies can be evaluated. We also emphasise the need for strong, concrete support from all members of the UN Development Group and including the Specialised Agencies for the Resident Co-ordinator in promoting system-wide
coherence of UN actions to help achieve the internationally agreed development goals and in improving co-operation with the Bretton Woods Institutions. Our discussion last week in the Co-ordination segment on the experience in Tanzania provided us with the opportunity to hear how this is working at the country level.
For this debate we wish to emphasise that, the EU believes that the TCPR has set the foundations to achieve many of the reforms we are seeking, and only 6 months into implementation we do not consider it necessary to revisit the policy framework so thoroughly debated in the General Assembly last year. For this segment of ECOSOC we must ensure that the mechanisms are in place to ensure the full implementation of the TCPR, and to agree on how we will monitor this implementation.
Mr President
The Secretary General has submitted three reports and a conference room paper to guide our discussions in response to paragraphs 22, 24, 37 and 101 of resolution 59/250. My comments will now address each of these separately.
Management process
The TCPR requested the Secretary General to design and report on an appropriate management process for full implementation of the resolution. In the EU we are keen to assess the plans that are being made to improve the effectiveness, efficiency and coherence of the United Nations Development system. For instance, we want to understand how the UN development system is taking forward important agendas such as capacity development in developing countries and how the specialised agencies, funds and
programmes and Bretton Woods Institutions are engaged in the reform efforts. We want to know where responsibilities lie for ensuring change and to assess the proposed targets, benchmarks and time frames. The report on the Management Process for implementation of the TCPR resolution is a helpful first step. We find the matrix particularly useful for structuring our work. It shows us that the changes proposed involve many parts of the UN development system and will take great joint efforts to
complete, but we hope this complexity doesn't obscure the relatively discrete steps required to make progress in many areas.
We would like to see responsibilities for action clearly allocated, and benchmarks and timeframes better defined. We encourage the Chief Executives Board (CEB), UN Development Group (UNDG) including the UNDG ExComm, and Agencies, Funds and Programmes to be clear of each other's respective roles. We would like to hear about how the strategic input provided by the CEB is effectively cascaded to the UNDG and agencies and informed by their more operational experience in delivering reform. To
sharpen our ECOSOC oversight function, we would like to discuss how the Council can review updated versions of the paper that include further detail on the actions and progress as it becomes available.
The UNDG Executive Committee Programme of Work for 2005-2007 spells out some specific targets for the rationalisation of UN country presence. The EU attaches a great deal of importance to all these measures as they are about practical ways of maximising the cost efficiency of UN teams at the national level, for example joint offices and UN houses. We wish to see ambitious targets, implemented as soon as possible.
Report on Comprehensive statistical data on operational activities for development 2003
The EU welcomes this report which adds a multi year perspective to the Secretary General's annual statistical compendium and fully incorporates available information and statistics on UN development activities. We encourage the Secretary General in his efforts to refine the work to address the methodological issues raised, and encourage the Secretary General and member states to use the analysis to inform their work on options for different funding modalities.
Report on Funding options and modalities
EU Member States are committed to providing more and better development assistance to the achievement of the MDGs. We also recognise that as the TCPR notes, the UN development system has not benefited commensurately from recent increases in development assistance and the stability of the UN development system is weakened by the relatively unpredictable way it is financed. To take advantage of the opportunities provided by the changing aid environment, the UN development system members,
individually and collectively, must further strive to fulfil an effective role in the development architecture at the country level. The internationally agreed development goals including those contained in the Millennium Declaration provide the strategic orientation for this work. Moreover, the UN needs to have a common, coherent, demand-driven and strategic programming approach for all UN operations for development, which is harmonised, co-ordinated with other partners in the multilateral
field and based on national processes and plans. We believe there is still much to be done to achieve this, although the dialogue at ECOSOC in the co-ordination and operational segments suggests reform is underway.
Like other aspects of development, funding modalities need to evolve to reflect changing times. The report to ECOSOC on Funding Options and Modalities includes a number of ideas on funding which deserve more in depth consideration. We remain committed to finding a more adequate, stable and predictable way of financing the system, including through raising our levels of core funding. We stand ready to engage in a dynamic consultation process that can ensure that the UN has the right structure,
programming tools and financing arrangements to maximise the contribution it will make to the goal we all share of achieving the MDG targets by 2015. This should take into account the changing development dynamics and challenges, and trends in aid modalities.
Mr President, as a final comment we commit ourselves to be creative and constructive in providing guidance to the Secretary General on how we wish to analyse progress in 2006 and 2007.
* Croatia continues to be part of the Stabilisation and Association Process.
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