EU Presidency Statement - SG's report on OIOS and Actions taken by Regional Commissions

EU Presidency Statement on Item 132: Report of the Secretary General on the activities of OIOS: Actions taken by regional commissions regarding recommendations of OIOS, by the Permanent Mission of the United Kingdom to the United Nations on behalf of the European Union, Fifth Committee, United Nations, New York

Thank you Mr Chairman. I have the honour to speak on behalf of the European Union. The Acceding Countries Bulgaria and Romania, the Candidate Countries Turkey and Croatia*, the Countries of the Stabilisation and Association Process and potential candidates Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro, EFTA country Iceland, member of the European Economic Area, as well as Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova align themselves with this declaration.

The European Union thanks Mr Kazi Rahman, the acting Chief of the New York office of Regional Commissions, for introducing the Secretary General's report in A/60/378. In a year when oversight in the UN has taken on a new visibility, the European Union attaches considerable importance to an assessment of how the Organisation has responded to recommendations by its internal oversight body.

Mr Chairman,

With respect to this particular report, the EU will pursue a number of specific issues during the informal consultations. So I will confine our remarks for now to the following general comments.

The report confirms our impression that the various recommendations of OIOS were to the point and particularly useful to the Regional Economic Commissions to re-organise and re-focus their work. We therefore welcome that some recommendations, such as recommendation 1 aiming at more succinct reporting, have already been implemented.

We have noted, on the other hand, that the response to other recommendations is that the RECs have met and discussed and shared best practice. There is little information about concrete steps to address the issues that the OIOS has suggested require attention nor is there any assessment of the impact on programme delivery that implementation of recommendations has had or could bring about. For example, with respect to improving resource mobilisation, we read that focal points for fund-raising have been introduced but there is very little detail on how fund-raising activities can be made more effective.

One of the more significant recommendations was that relating to a reassessment of intergovernmental machinery to streamline processes and avoid duplication. The EU has the impression that in certain cases this recommendation did not receive adequate consideration. We will follow this up in our informal consultations.

A further recommendation is related to the issue of evaluation, an issue that is of great importance to this Committee. We note that the response in the SG's report provides no new significant information. Given the comments by OIOS in their report about the lack or inadequacy of self-evaluation in the Regional Economic Commissions, we would have expected a more substantive answer. We will pursue this too in informals.


* Croatia continues to be part of the Stabilisation and Association Process.

| Arriba |

• EU Presidency Statement - OIOS report (13/10/2005)
• EU Presidency Statement - 5th Committee: Review of Efficiency (12/10/2005)
• EU Presidency Statement - 5th Committee: Programme of Work (10/10/2005)