UNEPS
United Nations Emergency Peace Service
UNEPS is being designated as a standing, individually recruited, gender sensitive, integrated, rapidly deployable UN peacekeeping service to provide effective, prevention-based response to genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and natural disasters. Often described as an international “911,” UNEPS could deploy within 48 hours of authorization to stabilize a potentially dangerous emergency situation. While a UNEPS deployment is under way, the UN would gain more time to find the necessary resources and personnel needed to organize a longer-term and more permanent operation as needed. However, we believe that a timely UNEPS deployment could manage many crises entirely, thus reducing the need for expensive, lengthy, complementary peacekeeping operations.
UNEPS would consist of approximately 15,000 civilian, police, and military professionals expertly trained on genocide and conflict prevention. The service would have mobile field headquarters and would act preventively, stopping a conflict before it escalates into a full-scale humanitarian disaster. Because the Service would be individually recruited from citizens worldwide, UNEPS would not be affected by the unwillingness of Member States to deploy portions of their own armed forces in times of crisis. Thus, prolonged delays typical of the current process of force generation for UN Peacekeeping operations would be avoided, and the chance that a conflict would escalate to uncontrollable levels would be significantly reduced.
While most focus on the number of lives that would be saved by this service, it is also instructive to note that the financial benefits of UNEPS would be significant. According to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, the international community could have saved nearly $130 billion of the $200 billion it spent on managing conflicts in the 1990s by focusing on conflict prevention or early intervention rather than post conflict reconstruction.
What can I do?
The UNEPS coalition is working hard to build support for the proposal within the UN, with diplomatic missions, and through parliamentary networks in all global regions. At the same time, it is very important for citizens all over the world to urge their governments – all of which have formally endorsed the principle that the international community has the ‘responsibility to protect’ innocent civilians if their own government does not do so – to support a proposal that would ultimately save lives of innocent civilians that would otherwise be lost due to delayed action by the UN and its Member States. A growing group of organizations, including EarthAction, believe that the UN Emergency Peace Service proposal is both necessary and politically viable. Please see the websites of our partners to learn more:
UNEPS site by Japanese Senator Inuzuka
UNEPS site by Senator Inuzuka (in Japanese)
World Federation of United Nations Associations
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