Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

to move:

That this House:

(1)

notes that:

(a)

29 May 2010 was the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers and 19 August 2010 will be World Humanitarian Day. These special days commemorate United Nations (UN) and humanitarian workers who provide life-saving assistance to millions of people around the world, who work in conflict zones and areas of natural hazards and who place their own lives at risk in the line of duty;

(b)

Australia has been a strong supporter of UN peacekeeping operations since the first mission in 1947 and is one of the top 20 contributors to the UN peacekeeping budget;

(c)

the UN’s total peacekeeping budget is US$6.8 billion, or half of one per cent of global military spending, indicating that building and keeping the peace is overwhelmingly cheaper than the pursuit of war;

(d)

there are over 124,000 military and civilian men and women working in 15 different UN missions around the world. They are not there for personal gain; rather they are engaged in maintaining peace and security and also in building the political, social and economic infrastructure required to ensure conflict zones can make the lasting transition to peace;

(e)

UN and other humanitarian workers are increasingly being targeted for political and ideological reasons. In the last decade, more than 800 humanitarian workers have died while striving to help those most in need in some of the world’s most hostile environments; and

(f)

the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti on 12 January 2010, taking the lives of thousands of Haitians and almost a hundred UN civilian and military peacekeepers was the biggest single loss of life in the history of UN peacekeeping. Prior to that, the largest loss of UN staff life in a single event was the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad on 19 August 2003.

(2)   Commends the vital work carried out by UN peacekeepers and other humanitarian workers and calls upon all United Nations member states to ensure the safety and security of UN peacekeepers and other humanitarian workers in the line of duty, and to appropriately punish perpetrators of violence against humanitarian workers.

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