Let us be clear about what it is we are saying by our inaction. We are saying...

Let us be clear about what it is we are saying by our inaction. We are saying that it is okay by us when a United Nations civilian staff member commits rape in a United Nations peacekeeping mission, where the host country has no functioning judiciary and when the country of nationality cannot exercise its criminal jurisdiction extraterritorially over the accused because it has no law allowing it to do so. Is that our view? Rapes perpetrated by United Nations civilian staff members in that context can go unpunished? That is precisely what it is we are saying, year after year. Please do not think those crimes have not happened, because they have. Do we have any credibility when we also insist that the United Nations has no business in relation to the conduct of investigations for alleged crimes committed by our own United Nations uniformed peacekeepers, knowing that in the past we, the Member States, were not reliable enough in guaranteeing that justice be done in respect of the victims? Are we credible when in the last reporting period of the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) we still had 42 cases of sexual exploitation and abuse involving United Nations peacekeepers being investigated by that Office? By now, some nine years after we identified both the challenge and the plan needed to eliminate this odious phenomenon, there should be practically no cases at all.