This follows reports over the past three years of UN peacekeeper rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Liberia, in Burundi, in Haiti — pick your country, and you can safely assume the UN has either denied it, refused to comment, or insisted that there is a zero tolerance policy for such abuse.

I’m outraged that the UN has done nothing about this issue, and continues to – oh, hold on.

Since January 2004, investigations were completed of some 291 peacekeeping mission personnel, resulting in the dismissal of 16 civilians, the repatriation of 16 members of formed police units and 137 repatriations or rotations home on disciplinary grounds of military personnel, including six commanders. (March 2006)

Wow, so it turns out they have been doing something after all.

Rape is unacceptable, and needs to be dealt with quickly. Denial (of the sort issued by James Ellery in the Telegraph article) helps nobody; but rape needs to be dealt with in a strong legal framework, and as we all know, rape is one of the most difficult offences to prove and successfully prosecute. This is particularly true in peace operations, where the situation is extremely chaotic, local laws and customs may confuse the issue, and power relations between peacekeepers and locals are unhealthy, to say the least.

When a US soldier commits rape, they are rightly tried within their own national framework, because none of us will accept a US soldier being tried by (for example) the government of Iraq. I assume you would want the same approach for any soldier, no matter which country they came from. In which case, why do you persistently blame the United Nations for the actions of soldiers over which it has limited sovereignty – limited by design of the General Assembly and the Security Council, on which the US is a permanent member?

Short version: rape is abhorrent and needs to be punished, but why not go after the countries that supply these soldiers, since they are the ones with the responsibility for punishing them?