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At the World Summit in 2005, global leaders resolved to “strengthen and update the programme of work of the United Nations so that it responds to the contemporary requirements of Member States”. Leaders instructed the General Assembly and other relevant organs (Security Council and ECOSOC) to “review all mandates older than five years originating from resolutions of the General Assembly and other organs”. The Secretary-General was requested to facilitate this process with analysis and recommendations.
Mandates express the will of Member States and are the means through which they grant authority and responsibility to the Secretary-General to implement their requests. For the purposes of the review process, a mandate has been defined as a request or a direction for action by the United Nations Secretariat or other implementing entities in the system, which originates in a resolution of the General Assembly or one of the other organs. There are more than 9000 mandates to be reviewed.
Through the mandate review process it is hoped that Member States will be able to serve as better custodians of their mandates. The current system does not sufficiently allow an intergovernmental organ, once it has adopted a resolution, to analyse the effectiveness of its mandates and how they contribute to the overall priorities of the organisation. This situation has compounded other problems including the uncoordinated and burdensome number of reports requested from the Secretariat, the unnecessary adoption of overlapping mandates by different bodies on the same issues, the creation of inconsistent architecture for implementing mandates, and growth in the number of mandates without similar growth in the resources with which they must be implemented.
Working with its CANZ partners Canada and Australia, New Zealand will continue to contribute to the mandate review process as it progresses through the 61st session and beyond.
