Mr Chairman,
I have the honour to speak on behalf of the European Union.
The European Union stated repeatedly its strong commitment to United Nations peacekeeping as a core function of the Organisation at the occasion when this Committee adopted the peacekeeping budgets, as we did when the new peacekeeping scale of assessments successfully was negotiated in December last year. In this sense we join consensus on the resolution on UNPROFOR, however, we do so with the following concern.
The issue of our concern is the fact that the amount of every peacekeeping budget will not be fully covered by contributions of Member States, as long as Member States do not honour their obligations to pay their assessed contributions. In the case of UNPROFOR this has now led to a situation where Member States which fulfilled their obligations neither can be credited with the unencumbered balance of more than 174 million USD nor can the troop contributors among them be reimbursed. This further contributes to the already difficult financial situation of the Organisation and could jeopardise the implementation of other peacekeeping operations.
I want to stress again that the European Union fully supports peacekeeping operations and to this end joins consensus on their financial resolutions. However, the European Union neither is ready to stand up for the payment of other Member States nor is the European Union ready to accept a factual increase in its effective share in the just agreed scale of assessments.
I thank you