The underworld of the United Nations peacekeeping operations : a European Court of Human Rights perspective

Abstract

The image of the UN began to be tainted in the past 20 years due to numerous allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation committed by personnel related to its peacekeeping operations.The current study briefly assessed the measures undertook by the organization in order to address the issue, as well as those took by its member states, the former having proved to be inefficient up until now, mostly because of their non-legally binding effect and the latter failing, troop-contributing countries having a very poor record of investigating and prosecuting perpetrators. The core of this paper was to explore alternative solutions to this problem. As such, its main purpose was to ascertain if through the ECtHR’s past and future case-law it would be possible to pressure the members of CoE to either proceed to effective investigations and prosecutions of their nationals involved in similar allegations, or to adapt, when needed, their laws accordingly. Court’s principles such as dual attribution of conduct and positive obligations of states were succinctly addressed, the focal point being the extraterritorial application of the ECHR to similar cases, our case study having been done on the situation related to Frech Sangaris Forces in Central African Republic.