II. Inventory of mandates

9. Legislative mandates express the will of the Member States and are the means through which the membership grants authority and responsibility to the Secretary-General to implement its requests. [4] The resolutions adopted from year to year by each of the principal organs are the primary source of mandates. Mandates are both conceptual and specific; they can articulate newly developed international norms, provide strategic policy direction on substantive and administrative issues, or request specific conferences, activities, operations and reports.

10. For this reason, mandates are not easily defined or quantifiable; a concrete legal definition of a mandate does not exist. Resolutions often signify directives for action by employing words such as "requests", "calls upon", or "encourages" but an assessment to distinguish the level of legal obligation arising from the use of these different words has yielded no definitive answers. Such ambiguity in resolutions may be deliberate "to make it easier for Member States to reach decisions. But since the membership has indicated a wish to use its review of mandates to examine opportunities for programmatic shifts, it is both necessary and desirable to identify a working definition of the unit of analysis and delineate the scope of the exercise.

11. Guided by the 2005 World Summit Outcome and subsequent discussions in the plenary, I have defined a mandate as a request or a direction, for action by the United Nations Secretariat or other implementing entities, that derives from a resolution of the General Assembly or one of the other relevant organs.

12. To facilitate the review and as a companion piece to this report, the Secretariat has compiled an electronic registry of mandates originating from the resolutions of the General Assembly, the Security Council and the Economic and Social Council. [5] The registry of mandates, along with accompanying guidance for users, is accessible at www.un.org/mandatereview.

13. The registry, which responds to requests from several Member States, is a searchable online inventory, and will give all delegations convenient access to information on all the Organization's active mandates and resolutions. It has the potential to improve communication and engagement between the membership and the Secretariat, as well as helping the principal organs manage their agenda. The inventory enables delegations to analyse mandates in a number of ways including by issue area, organ and date of adoption, type of activity requested, geographic scope and implementing entity. As agreed by the membership during consultations on the review of mandates, the issue areas that are used for this analysis are those identified in the Organization's programme priorities. [6]

14. The inventory currently contains only those mandates that are active or potentially active, because the review is being undertaken in order to "strengthen and update" the Organization, and not as a historical or archival record. A mandate has been considered active or potentially active if it meets at least one of three criteria: (a) at least one United Nations department or entity has indicated that the mandate is currently being implemented; (b) it receives an allocation in the budget; [7] (c) it has appeared on an agenda of one or more of the principal organs from September 2000 to September 2005. [8] A distribution of the active mandates by principal organ is provided in figure 1. The inventory includes mandates beyond those referred to in this report. Various sensitive issues have been discussed by the Member States during their consultations. Details of those mandates, like all others, are available in the electronic database.

Figure 1 – Distribution of active mandates by principal organ *

* This distribution reflects the data in the mandate registry, which is a work in progress.

15. The Summit Outcome also requests that the review be undertaken of mandates "older than five years" Owing to inconclusive consultations in the General Assembly over the past few months on how to interpret this phrase, the inventory includes (a) mandates originally adopted more than five years ago which have not been renewed within the past five years and (b) mandates originally adopted more than five years ago which have been renewed within the past five years in subsequent resolutions. It also includes, for reference, (c) mandates adopted within the past five years, so that the membership may see the totality of mandates, including those that may fall outside the scope of the review. In the registry, mandates are identified as falling in one of the three categories. The distribution of mandates between the three categories is illustrated in figure 2.

Figure 2 – Distribution of renewed and non-renewed active mandates *

* This distribution reflects the data in the mandate registry, which is a work in progress.

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