STATEMENT BY MR. KINGSTON RHODES,

CHAIRMAN OF THE UNITED NATIONS INTERNATIONAL CIVIL SERVICE COMMISSION TO THE FACULTY AND STUDENT BODY OF THE MOSCOW STATE UNIVERSITY FOR INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

THE INTERNATIONAL CIVIL SERVICE AND THE ROLE OF THE INTERNATIONAL CIVIL SERVICE COMMISSION

21 MAY 2012

Ambassador Anatoly Torkunov,

Distinguished Faculty Members of MGIMO,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

First, let me tell you how honoured I feel to be here with you today. Your invitation not only inspired me professionally, it also held great personal appeal and I will tell you why. Professionally, I always welcome the opportunity to speak on a subject that is near and dear to my heart, but also so crucial to the world we live in—the United Nations and especially the UN common system of organizations. For me it is rare for the personal and the professional to intersect, but that is the case today and it is unique in my experience. In fact, I must confess that the personal reason is just as compelling as the professional one for it allows me to indulge in nostalgia for my student years spent in Moscow over four decades ago. I was of course a much younger man then, impressionable and full of aspiration—like all of you here—and as I speak with you today, I will find it difficult to avoid remembering my younger self—trying to learn Russian, accommodating to the snow and the cold, but mostly preparing to master the skills to succeed in the larger world.

After completing my degree in statistics at МЭСИ here in Moscow, I returned to my home country of Sierra Leone where I began my professional career in 1969 as a statistician at the National Statistical Office and carried out some of the earliest agricultural statistical surveys and set up systems for measuring artisanal fisheries catch. Not long afterwards, I went to Washington, D.C. where I was attached to the US Bureau of the Census and completed a Masters’ Degree at George Washington University. I eventually joined the United Nations where I continue to serve and be inspired by its ideals. I feel certain that my training here in Russia prepared me for my later professional career and, although I didn’t know it at the time, also set me on the road to an international career and ultimately, the United Nations.
Today, I would like to speak to you about the United Nations and what it does around the world. As students in this elite institute I know that you are already well informed about its activities, but at a remove now of almost 70 years, the history and origins of this noble institution are sometimes forgotten. The United Nations rose out of the ashes of the Second World War. It was established so that succeeding generations would never again suffer the scourge of global conflict. Although the League of Nations, an institution with a similar goal, had been established after the First World War, it proved incapable of preventing the rise of the Axis powers which withdrew from the League, leading to the Second World War and the ultimate demise of the League of Nations. In 1944, determined to build a lasting institution to preserve the peace, representatives of the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France and the Republic of China met at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. to formulate proposals for the creation of the United Nations. By 1945, 51 countries had signed on, committing themselves to maintain peace through international cooperation and collective security. Meeting in San Francisco at the United Nations Conference on International Organization, they drew up a Charter for the new United Nations that included its purpose, principles and organizational structure. The United Nations officially came into existence on 24 October 1945.


Today, 193 nations, nearly every nation in the world, are members of the United Nations, meaning that they have agreed to accept the obligations of the UN Charter which sets out their rights and duties as members of the world community. Every Member State, whether large or small, rich or poor and irrespective of political, economic and social systems—has a voice and one vote. The Charter calls for the United Nations to maintain international peace and security by developing friendly relations among nations, to cooperate in solving international economic, social, cultural and humanitarian problems and in promoting respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and to be a centre for harmonizing actions of nations.

While the United Nations remains tireless in pursuit of these lofty goals, we who follow world events know how difficult it has been to fulfill them. Since 1948, the United Nations has fielded over 60 peacekeeping and observer missions. Today, there are 16 active peacekeeping forces currently in operation. Peacekeepers are called in when the United Nations is tasked with ending conflicts that threaten regional stability and, by extension, international peace and security. They aim at restoring calm so that the negotiating process can go forward; sometimes the mere presence of peacekeepers—the blue helmets—can save local populations from becoming victims of conflicts. United Nations peacekeeping operations have been largely successful, but some have fallen short. With respect to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the 1995 massacre in Srebenica, we know today that the United Nations should have done more to end these atrocities sooner. I personally believe they happened because they defied our collective powers to even imagine them, let alone understand them. All peacekeeping missions are reviewed for lessons learned, but these two in particular led to deep reflection and somber self-examination by the UN.

Peacekeeping is of course a key activity and one for which the UN is perhaps best known, but the UN has countless other programmes and activities that affect the lives of people all over the globe. Most people think of the United Nations as an organization headquartered in New York where the Security Council meets and heads of state pay an annual fall visit. In fact, the United Nations is much, much more. It is a family of organizations, encompassing not only the United Nations Secretariat in New York and its separately administered Funds and Programmes, but also 16 individual, specialized agencies. The specialized agencies have wide-ranging international responsibilities in the economic, social, cultural, educational, health and other fields. Two well-known examples are the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Labour Organization (ILO). The agencies all have different mandates which can usually be understood by their names. For example, the WHO strives to prevent and eradicate disease and improve promote health standards; the ILO seeks the promotion of social justice and internationally recognized human and labour rights. Many of the agencies are older than the UN itself with origins in the nineteenth century, though their establishment as specialized agencies of the United Nations occurred for the most part in the aftermath of World War Two. For example, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which took its present name in 1934, began life as the International Telegraph Union in 1865. It became a specialized agency of the UN in 1947, and has continued to expand its mandate to encompass the entire ICT sector, from digital broadcasting to the Internet, etc. Other specialized agencies, such as the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the Universal Postal Union, to cite only two, have similar histories.

Since information on the specialized agencies is available from many sources and most of you are doubtless aware of what the agencies do, I will not spend time today summarizing their mandates. Instead, I would like to familiarize you with the people who carry out United Nations programmes and activities and tell you how they are selected. Currently, the United Nations common system employs almost 100,000 staff serving in over 600 locations around the world. The so-called international staff are recruited from countries all over the globe and the so-called local staff are recruited in their home countries. The UN workforce represents a wide range of professions—among others, economists, translators, statisticians, lawyers, carpenters, IT specialists, administrators, human resources specialists, medical, health and nutrition professionals, human rights experts—and bring to the organizations diverse perspectives and experience. For its geographic, linguistic and cultural diversity, UN staff have no peers. The recruitment of international civil servants is not an easy task and is quite unlike the process for national civil services or the private sector because it seeks people with the specific ability to work in international locations and in harmony with colleagues of different nationalities, values and cultures, all working towards a common goal.

When the United Nations Charter was being written, the drafters took care to set out the fundamental principles for the recruitment of staff. Article 101.3 states that the essential criteria for recruitment shall be “the highest standards of efficiency, competence and integrity.” But the Charter also made clear that due regard must also be paid to, and I quote, “recruiting the staff on as wide a geographical basis as possible.” While requirements of efficiency, competence and integrity are common to most employers, it is the emphasis on a wide geographical basis that sets the United Nations apart. Member States wished to ensure that the UN Secretariat reflected the membership of the organization and was not dominated by any one country, region or linguistic group. Having a broad geographical distribution of staff ensures: responsiveness to diverse political, social and cultural systems, exposure to different viewpoints and it enables members of the public throughout the world to identify with the various faces of United Nations staff. Most of all it ensures that the Member States themselves will have confidence in the staff of the Secretariat.

United Nations organizations look for candidates—both men and women, gender balance being a key goal—that demonstrate professionalism and integrity, as well as commitment, motivation, flexibility, cultural sensitivity and good team and communication skills. Depending upon where UN staff serve, a day in the office can encompass many different things from interviewing refugees, monitoring elections, overseeing food distribution, talking to former child soldiers or eradicating disease. Some of the work is less visible, such as securing funds from donors, setting up structures for effective emergency response, preparing budgets or administering staff entitlements. As a great deal of the work is carried out in the field, often in hardship settings, staff have to be prepared to serve in several field locations throughout their career, including hardship and non-family duty stations.

My own field of statistics falls into what could be called an invisible category. Though currently serving as Chairman of the United Nations International Civil Service Commission (ICSC), having been elected by the United Nations General Assembly, I started my UN career in 1980 in the International Civil Service Commission (ICSC) secretariat as a junior statistician and retired in 2004 as Executive Secretary of the Commission. I returned to ICSC after retirement and serve today as its Chairman. ICSC afforded me the opportunity of a varied career; starting in a narrow technical field, I was able to move into broader, more conceptual areas. There is nothing unusual about my story. The UN affords a wealth of choices.

I would like to talk in more detail about the ICSC. The main function of the Commission, in the words of its Statute, is “the development of a single, unified international civil service through the application of common personnel standards, methods and arrangements.” What does this mean? ICSC was established in 1975, mandated by the General Assembly to coordinate and regulate the conditions of service of staff of the United Nations common system of organizations—that is, those organizations that have agreed to abide by the decisions of the Commission. The effect of coordination and regulation, to take but a single example, is that a senior economist or translator at the United Nations in New York cannot earn more than a senior economist or translator at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)or at any other organization or duty station where UN common system staff serve. The Commission, through systems known as job classification and post adjustment, ensure the principle of equal pay for equal work. Positions are classified according to their functions, and duty stations are assigned a post adjustment level, arrived at through cost-of-living surveys, to equalize purchasing power throughout the world. These two systems ensure that staff serving in, say, Bangkok, Paris or Nairobi enjoy the same standard of living as staff serving everywhere else, such as Geneva, Addis Ababa or New York. In other words, all staff working in common system organizations receive equal pay for work of equal value and have equal purchasing power regardless of where in the world they serve.

The work of ICSC is aided by a small secretariat made up of staff who are experts in their fields and that carries out the technical work and prepares position papers which form the basis for the Commission’s consideration and eventual recommendations and decisions.

While conditions of service are at the heart of the Commission’s mandate, they are not an end in themselves. They serve rather as tools to ensure the efficient delivery of programmes and activities mandated by the Member States of the international organizations. When the 15 members of the Commission come together—as they do twice a year—to consider the proposals before it, they do so in the presence of the representatives of the organizations and the staff unions who also have the opportunity to weigh in with their own views and opinions. The task of the Commission is a delicate one, requiring it to fairly balance the needs of all its interlocutors: it must take into account the interests of Member States, the concerns of the organizations for the effective delivery of programmes within budgetary constraints and the aspirations of the staff who are, after all, so essential to the effort.