H.E. Ambassador Cho Hyun, Deputy Permanent Representative, at Informal Plenary of the General Assembly
Thank you, Mr. Chairman,
1. My delegation believes that Chapter III is a very important part of the Secretary-General’s report on “Mandating and delivering”, in that he presents in this chapter core issues, or rather core challenges, that we have to look into in the process of our mandate review.
2. As the Secretary-General rightly pointed out in this chapter, burdensome and redundant reporting requirements, overlapping mandates between and within principal organs, unwieldy and duplicative architectures for implementation, and gaps between mandates and resources have all been chronic problems. In this regard, we fully agree with the merits of his proposals for a rationalized documentation architecture, improved mandate implementation through strategic evaluation, and the establishment of strategic direction for mandates.
3. My delegation shares the Secretary-General’s view that we need to focus more on the mandate-generation cycle. This will highlight not only the accountability of the Secretariat, but also the responsibility of the Member States, in operating and managing our mandates. Irresponsible over-issuance of mandates has contributed to trivializing the resolutions, which has in turn lessened the efficiency and effectiveness of the UN in tackling important global issues.
4. Regarding the excessive reporting requirements, we believe this has been one of the chronic problems of the UN system. The heavy reporting burden cost a great deal of time and resources while producing many repetitive reports with only marginal differences in their content. While we are awaiting more detailed proposals from the Secretariat, my delegation sees the Secretary-General’s initiative for rationalized documentation architecture as very much forward-looking. We strongly urge the Secretary-General to provide continuous advice and suggestions in this regard, because we believe the Secretariat is the organization with the most accumulated wisdom about this problem.
5. We are of the view that if the Secretariat can develop a cross-sectoral, cross-agenda consolidated report, as suggested in the Secretary-General’s report, it will not only help to streamline reporting requirements, but also contribute to enhancing our understanding of multifaceted issues by presenting them in a broadened context, thus enabling the UN system to devise more appropriate and prescriptive measures to deal with such complex matters.
6. My delegation believes that the reporting requirement issue is a good short-term objective in this mandate review exercise, since it is relatively easy to rectify the problem and implement a solution. In this respect, we hope that the Secretariat, based upon its long experience in this field, will provide Member States with innovative suggestions for improvement.
7. Another key challenge is improving mandate implementation through strategic evaluation. We fully support the proposal contained in the report that the Secretariat provide information about the proposed mandates contained in draft resolutions in the same way that it currently provides programme budget implications when draft resolutions are being considered. We also agree that more investment should be made in this area so that we can at least catch up to the level of investment in other international organizations.
Thank you.