Accountability in Peace Operations and the Evolution of the United Nations Human Rights Due Diligence Policy

As international organizations increasingly cooperate with national actors in order to implement global decisions and policies, such partnerships have often become problematic when implementing partners have increasingly been accused of serious human rights violations.
GISELA HIRSCHMANN analyzes how implementing partners from the host state of a United Nations peace operation are held accountable. Arguing that the complexity of contemporary peacekeeping limits the availability of traditional accountability mechanisms, she develops a conceptual model to demonstrate how, instead, different accountability forms interact and complement each other.
In an article titled ‘Cooperating with evil? Accountability in peace operations and the evolution of the United Nations Human Rights Due Diligence Policy’, published in Cooperation and Conflict, the author illustrates this interplay of accountability with a case study on the emergence of the UN Human Rights Due Diligence Policy (HRDDP).
The accountability framework enacted by the Joint Human Rights Unit, the Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the context of the UN peace operation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) threatened the legitimacy of UN peacekeeping. As a consequence, the UN adopted the HRDDP as a new, UN-based accountability mechanism to hold implementing partners from the host state of peace operations accountable.
The UN’s operations in the DRC (MONUC or MONUSCO as it is named since July 2010) have become a case in point for the implications of the cooperation between international organizations and national actors, HIRSCHMANN states. The UN decided to cooperate with the Congolese army to disarm and re-integrate former combatants in particular in the Eastern Congo. Many of these actors supported by the UN, however, had and have been committing serious human rights violations such as sexual abuse and mass killings. “The question of accountability thus became of utmost relevance, not only for the UN’s operation in the DRC but also for other operations that supported partners who had been violating human rights.”
Initially, the UN denied any association with the alleged human rights violators and tried to redirect the blame to the implementing partner on the ground. This blame avoidance strategy, however, proved untenable for the UN Secretariat once the practice that ultimately violated human rights became directly associated with MONUC’s mandate to support the alleged perpetrators, HIRSCHMANN writes.
Normative pressure increased after the ICC’s indictment against Bosco Ntaganda had been unsealed. In particular, the report of the Special Rapporteur – which for the first time openly acknowledged the relationship between MONUC’s mandate and the human rights violations committed in the context of joint operations – as well as press and NGO reporting on MONUC’s support to the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo increased the pressure on the UN. Facing a legitimacy crisis, the UN Secretariat realized that blame could no longer be redirected. In order to restore the organization’s legitimacy, it supported the development of a conditionality policy for the operation in the Congo. This policy became the foundation for the Human Rights Due Diligence Policy, an instrument to hold national cooperating security partners accountable for human rights violations.
By analyzing the evolution of this policy, HIRSCHMANN has demonstrated how pluralist accountability, by threatening an international organization’s legitimacy, can result in increased vertical accountability.
Three conclusions can be drawn from the analysis of accountability dynamics in peace operations, HIRSCHMANN states. The first concerns the institutional relationship of pluralist accountability holders. Third parties can become accountability holders even if they are formally part of the institutional structure of an operation. The Joint Human Rights Office in this case was officially part of the operation’s institutional structure but de facto independent through their close relationship to their external mandate-givers. The UN’s increasing tendency to integrate human rights components into the institutional framework of a peacekeeping operation has generated the – in some cases well-founded – fear that human rights would be further marginalized in the operation’s activities. Also, within MONUSCO there were attempts to marginalize the work of the human rights component. The effort of the Joint Human Rights Office to act as an accountability holder and to support the experts of the Special Procedures as accountability holders constitutes an important example of the importance of a strong human rights component for accountability in peace operations.
The second conclusion that can be drawn from her study is that pluralist accountability emerged even in cases where the implementing tasks were delegated to sovereign actors. The results thus show that sovereignty concerns do not preclude the development of pluralist accountability. This is an important insight for the study of complex global governance arrangements, where international organizations cooperate with national implementing partners on the ground that emphasize their sovereignty.
Finally, against the background of the potential emergence of Global Administrative Law, the HRDDP can be considered an important step forward in promoting compliance with core human rights principles in global security governance. Members of the UN Secretariat emphasize that the HRDDP is nothing revolutionary as it is supposedly not new that the UN should be bound by international humanitarian law, human rights law and refugee law; from an international law perspective it is indeed nothing new. However, the disapproving reactions from the MONUC leadership indicate that the recognition of these obligations by the UN itself is nevertheless something rather novel. The development of the HRDDP therefore can be regarded as a significant means of vertical accountability, through which the UN Secretariat engaged in monitoring and sanctioning the implementing partners.
It is important to note, however, that institutionalized vertical accountability does not necessarily lead to effective human rights protection, HIRSCHMANN states. The current scope of the HRDDP is limited to the UN’s cooperation with national security institutions only, although the UN is beginning to apply it also to its provision of support to regional organizations such as the African Union. Moreover, sexual violence is far too widespread in the DRC for the UN’s conditionality to make a tangible difference, leaving aside the human rights attitudes of a number of peacekeepers.
It is still too early to say to what extent the HRDDP actually improved the respect for human rights within the Congolese army or other implementing partners of the UN, according to HIRSCHMANN. “Nevertheless, it can be regarded as an important sign that the UN has become aware of its responsibility as a vertical accountability holder when cooperating with national implementing partners.”