Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS) has annual meetings, and that is the biggest gathering of practitioners and academics researching on the UN system. I had a pleasure of presenting at the Plenary this April.
This year’s meeting was in Seoul, Korea.
In its Plenary III, entitled ‘Protection and Promotion of Human Rights in Humanitarian Crises’, I presented the findings of my research into individual criminal accountability of UN police personnel. The essense is that challenges that the UN encounters in holding individual UN police officers who commit serious crimes in UN Peace Operations reflect the UN’s fundamental problems. It is not the lack of jurisdiction nor the issue of immunity, as are often claimed by States, that are preventing criminal prosecution of individuals who commit serious crimes.
