Mr. President,

Thank you for the opportunity to address the Council today and for this very timely meeting. I would like to firstly express our appreciation for the many women and men serving in peacekeeping operations around the world, often under very dangerous circumstances.

Thank you also to the Secretary-General for his briefing and for the report “Review on the future of all forms of United Nations peace operations”.

We are proud to have provided input to the review and to have hosted last year’s Peacekeeping Ministerial, where over 140 Member States expressed overwhelming political support for peacekeeping.

Mr. President,

The gap between

• the potential of peacekeeping as an instrument for conflict resolution in a spirit of true global burden-sharing on the one hand

• and the practice of peacekeeping operations on the other hand

is significant and deserves our attention.

So as we start into the discussion of the future of peacekeeping and the follow-up to the SG report, the leading question is, to our mind:

How can we design, mandate and equip missions to make them effective and assure the necessary political support?

I would like to make two points today, one on substance and one on process and follow up

On substance:

Missions require mandates that allow them to succeed on the ground.

We have a collective responsibility to design mandates in a way that allows a mission to achieve tangible and sustainable results, first and foremost for the affected population of the host state.

That does not mean finding the smallest common denominator or compromising for the sake of agreeing on a mandate.

Very concretely we would suggest that we think more about the following aspects of mandates.

• This could for example mean using a sequenced approach; starting with a modest, narrowly defined mandate and then widen it, as conditions on the ground allow.

• It could mean utilizing a broader spectrum of mission setups and configurations, as described in the Independent Study on the Future of Peacekeeping prepared for the Berlin Ministerial.

• We could look at limited presence that would be appropriate.

• Or in other cases, we could look at setting long term objectives beyond standard yearly mandate cycles - depending on what is more expedient and realistic in a specific environment.

The UN has a proven positive track record of adapting its peace operations to different contexts.

With increased flexibility and by making progress achievable and more visible, we should find our way back to employing an under-utilized instrument we all agree still provides one of the most cost-effective and legitimate approaches to conflict resolution.

Mr. President, on process:

Concerning the implementation of the Secretary-General’s report: We encourage the Secretariat to actively seek Member States’ support and commitment for the implementation of recommendations from the report; a framework, which already proved successful for the implementation of the Action for Peacekeeping initiative.

Reforming and strengthening all peace operations must remain at the center of our attention - amongst Member States, in the Security Council, the General Assembly, and as part of the priorities of the next leadership of this organization.

Germany remains committed to peacekeeping and will continue to contribute to these efforts.

And we hope that together we can achieve real change and provide better solutions to those affected by crises we currently fail to address.

Thank you.