Page 15 - The CoESPU Magazine N 1 - 2018

How to transform a Police Force and Criminal Justice System

that are part of the problem

One of the most detrimental gaps impeding the international community when it seeks to
stabilize a state ravaged by internal conflict, is the absence of authoritative guidance on how to deal with
indigenous police and criminal justice systems that provide impunity for political elites who obstruct
peace implementation. Spoilers who thwart the implementation of a mandate from the United Nations or
another mandating authority, commit an international crime that imperils the very purpose of peace and
stability operations. The existence of this knowledge or
“doctrinal” gap is manifested in the 2015 Department of
Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) “Guidelines: Police
Capacity-building and Development” which states:
These Guidelines are based on the assumption that the
host State government is committed to the objective of
good and democratic governance, including the
establishment of a responsive, representative and
i
accountable police service…
This assumption, when fallacious, can doom a mission to
frozen conflicts at best and near collapse of the mission at
worst (e.g. Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Haiti,
Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Sudan). In
spite of the potentially calamitous risks associated with
basing missions on this best case assumption, DPKO has
no methodology to test whether this dubious assumption holds true or not. The DPKO Integrated
Assessment and Planning Handbook promulgated in December 2013 acknowledges that “there is no
agreed United Nations system-wide methodology for comprehensively assessing risks to the United
Nations in post-conflict and
ii
conflict settings.” Thus the
UN’s approach to capacity
building is based on an
assumption-- that the host State
government is committed to
the objective of good and
democratic governance—that it
has not developed a
methodology for assessing.
Unfortunately, this assumption
is rarely valid. Over 70% of
the UN’s post-1990 missions
have been confounded by
spoilers in the form of
criminalized power structures Rwandan family trying to get off the genocide
iii
that obtain and maintain power on the basis of illicit sources of revenue. Invariably such regimes suborn
the legal system. As the “Report of the Secretary-General on United Nations Policing” acknowledges:

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