Commission and UN co-operate on reform

The European Commission and the United Nations are to promote short-term exchanges of staff between the two institutions to ­encourage administrative reform and best practice.

On Tuesday (3 October) Siim Kallas, the European commissioner for administration, signed a memorandum of understanding with Mark Malloch Brown, UN deputy ­secretary-general.

The memorandum covers the exchange of "available information", information visits and short-term exchanges of officials working in general administration, budgeting, planning and reporting, control systems, accountability and ethics and human resource management.

A Commission spokes-man said that the Commission wanted to be actively involved in reforming the UN and wanted a more structured way to give its input.

Malloch Brown denied that all parts of the UN were lagging behind the Commission in reform. The UN Development Programme and UNICEF had, he said, "a lot to teach the European Commission about speed of operations and…being focused on delivery".

They had much more flexible employment policies and were much more results-oriented, he added.

But, he said, the UN Secretariat-General was behind the Commission in administrative reform. The UN was learning from the Commission, particularly in its policies on internal audit, oversight and governance.

"It has got a lot of catching up to do," he said, adding that the Commission had been "enormously helpful".

But Malloch Brown added that one of the lessons that he took from the Commission’s experience was that there was a danger of over-reacting to scandals such as those that beset the Santer Commission and the UN’s oil-for-food programme.

The temptation was, he said, to introduce more rules and regulation and more controls with the result that decision-making became more difficult. There was, he said, a danger of "more rules, more ­caution, less quality of ­decision-making".

The European Commission and the United Nations are to promote short-term exchanges of staff between the two institutions to ­encourage administrative reform and best practice.