The United Nations said that it had a systemic failure of the UN system in Sri Lanka as a whole.

 

Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson briefing journalists in New York about the new “Rights up Front” initiative said: “You may recall in the IRP [Internal Review Panel] Report on Sri Lanka, that we had a systemic failure of the UN system as a whole and that we need to show greater flexibilities and come up with speedier action.” Mr. Eliasson stressed, echoing his remarks to an informal meeting of the General Assembly earlier this week.

There, he told delegations that the Panel’s report, issued last year, also concluded that the UN Secretariat, its funds and programmes, were not given the support they needed to carry out the responsibilities which the Member States had set out for the Organization.

The goal of the new initiative, he said, is to ensure that past UN failures are not repeated, such as its inability to have prevented genocide in Rwanda, where at least 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were killed during a span of three months in 1994, and in Srebrenica, where at least 6,000 Muslim men and boys in a UN protection zone were massacred in 1995 during the wars in former Yugoslavia.