Mr. John Whyte:

For UNRWA, we are an operational agency with a renewable mandate. Our job is to implement services on the ground in response to the mandate we are given by the UN General Assembly and the funding we are given by New York and member states. On the political side of things, we welcome these opportunities to engage actively but of course our mandate is not really political in the same way. There are other UN agencies that have a more explicit political mandate. I am not trying to avoid the Deputy's question but I am trying to contextualise where our duties and obligations lie as an agency.

As we have commented already, the political temperature around UNRWA is superheated. Serious allegations were made and member states reacted, maybe took them at face value and perhaps did not wait for due process to be followed. We were adversely impacted by all of that. Thankfully, the subsequent investigations have vindicated or at least shown that there is no case to answer, unlike was alleged. Nevertheless, the commissioner-general was put in a position where he took drastic action to dismiss some staff who were on an initial list because he felt that, in the absence of any time for a due process, he had no choice but to take action. He did that but the investigation then vindicated some of those staff. The damage was done at the beginning and we have been struggling to recover ever since. As I said earlier, that campaign against UNRWA has not stopped. It is consistent and ongoing. As was acknowledged by one of the committee members, the Colonna report, which was commissioned to look into the allegations and UNRWA's standing in terms of neutrality, found that we were actually probably more neutral than most other agencies in terms of our safeguards, internal policies and procedures. Of course, there is always room for improvement. It is an organisation of 30,000 staff across five different fields. Nevertheless, given that we place such a high regard on the importance of impartiality, independence, neutrality and the humanitarian approach to delivery of aid, we have disciplined ourselves to a large extent because we know that we are the most targeted and watched agency and because of the political nature of the context in which we are operating. I hope that answers the Deputy's question.