Brussels, 03/02/2012 (Agence Europe) - There has been an improvement in the way EU humanitarian aid is managed, but this needs to continue and the way funds find their way from the EU to the United Nations leaves a lot to be desired and is in fact the worst aspect of EU aid management, explains the European Parliament in a resolution passed on 2 February 2012.
Rapporteur Martin Ehrenhauser (NA, Austria) said that humanitarian aid should target those who need it the most and inefficiency in this domain costs lives,hence the importance of the resolution on the auditing and control of EU humanitarian aid and its recommendations.
The European Parliament urges the Commission to continue to finetune improvements to smooth cooperation with internatioanl partners when the partnership contract is renewed later this year (covering the EU relations with bodies like the Red Cross and the International Organisation for Migration). MEPs say that the European Commission's humantarian aid and civilian protection department, ECHO, should reduce red tape for partners while ensuring high responsibility and ownership, transparency and speedy correction of shortcomings found in the regular audits.
The relationship between ECHO and its United Nations' partners are governed by a financial and administrative contract but use shared management to implement the budget. Aware of the huge shortcomings observed in the way funds are transferred and applied, along with serious shortcomings in the monitoring and follow-up of EU funding on the ground using the shared management system, the EP urges the Commission to take measures to ensure reliable auditing by UN bodies. It points out that the current updating of the Financial Regulation suggests that EU funding channelled through the UN and other international bodies should be managed using the “indirect management” system. MEPs are unhappy with the vagueness of UN reports which do not give enough tangible detail about project outcomes, and therefore urge the Commission to ensure that the UN reports cover such areas in future. The EP says that member states should show more political will to make changes at the United Nations to make it more responsible and take proper ownership, and urge the EU high representative for foreign affairs and security policy to raise the question as a matter of priority and act as a facilitator. (AN/transl.fl)