Towards a unified security system; Fifth Committee: Administrative and Budgetary.

• Position: 59th General Assembly

The Fifth Committee confines its scope not just to "budgetary and administration" issues. It also monitors United Nations activities as diverse as reviewing human resources management policies and establishing strengthened security management systems to protect UN staff members worldwide. In a nutshell, it "considers all issues relating to the machinery of the Organization", Committee Chairman Don MacKay of New Zealand told the UN Chronicle.

On the recommendation of the Committee, the General Assembly added $53.63 million to the United Nations regular budget to establish the Department of Safety and Security, as requested by Secretary-General Kofi Annan. "This was a very substantive discussion, which together with human resources dominated our main session", Ambassador MacKay said. It was in December 2003 that the Committee approved a two-year regular budget of $3.16 billion for the biennium 2004-2005. In 2004, it was increased to $3.6 billion, as a result of establishing the political mission in Afghanistan, strengthening security, and exchange rate adjustments owing to the decreasing market value of the dollar.

The Department of Safety and Security will have 383 posts, 134 of them temporary. Under the plan unveiled by Mr. Annan, three separate entities currently responsible for staff safety-Office of the Security Coordinator, UN Security and Safety Services, and the security component of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations--will be combined into a new directorate of security, to be headed by an Under-Secretary-General. In presenting his proposal, the Secretary-General said that there were an "extraordinary number of people we have to protect: 100,000 international and national staff, plus 300,000 of their family members and dependents, serving the world at more than 140 field locations and Headquarters duty stations". The United Nations, humanitarian organizations and other traditional UN partners had become targets of political violence since 1992, "challenging the long-held perception that we were protected by our flag and by our status as an impartial, benevolent actor".

Denisa Hutanova of the Slovak Republic told the Chronicle that "in spite of it being an off-budget year, the Committee gave priority consideration to financing on the question of a strengthened and unified United Nations security system". It recommended 40 draft proposals to the General Assembly, which unanimously adopted 24 resolutions during its fifty-ninth...