UN News Centre

Female police offi­cers serv­ing in UN peace­keep­ing oper­a­tions in Haiti

The Secu­rity Coun­cil today autho­rized the deploy­ment of addi­tional police offi­cers to serve with the United Nations peace­keep­ing force in Haiti as part of efforts to help boost the capac­ity of the country’s national police to deal with the myr­iad chal­lenges in the wake of January’s cat­a­strophic earthquake.

The deploy­ment of 680 fur­ther offi­cers as a result of today’s Coun­cil res­o­lu­tion will bring the total num­ber of UN Police (UNPOL) serv­ing with the UN mis­sion, which is known as MINUSTAH, to 4,391.

Just one week after the dev­as­tat­ing quake struck Haiti on 12 Jan­u­ary, the Coun­cil backed Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s call for addi­tional troops, adding 2,000 mil­i­tary per­son­nel and 15,000 UNPOL.

More than 200,000 peo­ple were killed in the magnitude-7.0 earth­quake, which left 1.3 mil­lion more home­less and destroyed count­less build­ings, includ­ing Gov­ern­ment facil­i­ties, hos­pi­tals and schools.

In today’s res­o­lu­tion, the Coun­cil said it rec­og­nized “the need for MINUSTAH to assist the Gov­ern­ment of Haiti in pro­vid­ing ade­quate pro­tec­tion of the pop­u­la­tion, with par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to the needs of inter­nally dis­placed per­sons (IDPs) and other vul­ner­a­ble groups, espe­cially women in children.”

Other chal­lenges, it said, include deal­ing with the risk of a resur­gence in gang vio­lence, orga­nized crime and child trafficking.

The Coun­cil also encour­aged MINUSTAH to pro­vide logis­ti­cal and tech­ni­cal exper­tise to help the Gov­ern­ment, as requested, con­tinue efforts to bol­ster the rule of law and accel­er­ate the imple­men­ta­tion of reset­tle­ment plans for IDPs.

Such steps on the part of the mis­sion “will be phased out as Hait­ian national capac­ity grows,” it said.

The res­o­lu­tion also under­scored the impor­tance of hold­ing elec­tions “in a timely man­ner,” call­ing on all polit­i­cal par­ties and oth­ers to coop­er­ate to make this a reality.

Last month, a task force com­pris­ing the UN and its inter­na­tional part­ners – includ­ing the Caribbean Com­mu­nity (CARICOM), the Orga­ni­za­tion of Amer­i­can States (OAS) and the Euro­pean Union (EU) – pledged sup­port for Haiti’s polls, viewed as a cru­cial step in renew­ing the State after the huge human and mate­r­ial losses suf­fered in the Jan­u­ary earthquake.

In his most recent report to the Coun­cil in April, the Secretary-General said the elec­tions in early 2011 were cen­tral to the Government’s vision for a renewed State, a vision he appealed to the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity to support.

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=34920&Cr=haiti&Cr1=#