§ Mrs. GillanTo ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what measures his Department proposes to make conflict prevention and peacekeeping more effective. [1833]
§ Peter HainThe Foreign and Commonwealth Office is engaged on a number of fronts to make international conflict prevention and peacekeeping more effective. We are working to push conflict prevention up the international agenda with GB, UN and EU partners; to help make international organisations better at peacekeeping and conflict prevention; to assist other countries with their peacekeeping efforts; and to improve our own contribution.
We support the UN Secretary-General's efforts to move the UN:
from a culture of reaction to a culture of prevention",and welcome his recent report on conflict prevention, which pursues this aim. We are working closely with EU and UN partners to follow up implementation of the report on UN Peace Operations drawn up by the Panel chaired by Ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi in 2000. In particular, we are pressing for improved early warning mechanisms within the UN system, better analysis of where problems might arise and more effective rapid deployment mechanisms. We are also working with UN Security Council partners to improve the decision-making processes leading to the deployment of UN peacekeeping operations.The Government have established two cross-departmental conflict prevention pooled funds to help maximise our contribution to conflict prevention and peacekeeping work. The pools—one for sub-Saharan Africa and one for the rest of the world—are jointly managed by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department for International Development and the Ministry of Defence Their purpose is to produce a joint strategy to facilitate collective decision making on where 257W and how to focus our conflict prevention efforts, enabling Government to identify ways in which these Departments, by working more closely together can make more a effective contribution.
We are also putting mechanisms in place to improve the effectiveness of our national contributions to peacekeeping. These involve a rapid deployment capability for civilian police and on-call arrangements for military personnel.