UNMAS

The United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) was established in 1997 and sits within the UN Department of Peace Operations (DPO). It serves as the system-wide coordinator for mine action across the UN, working with 11 other UN departments, agencies, programmes, and funds that contribute to the Inter-Agency Coordination Group on Mine Action (IACG-MA), which UNMAS chairs.

UNMAS pursues five core pillars of mine action as set out in International Mine Action Standards (IMAS): clearance of landmines and explosive remnants of war (ERW); risk education for affected populations; victim assistance; stockpile destruction; and advocacy for universalization of relevant treaties. Those treaties include the 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention (Ottawa Treaty), the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) and its Protocol V on Explosive Remnants of War, and the Arms Trade Treaty.

Operationally, UNMAS deploys to support peacekeeping missions, special political missions, and humanitarian responses. It has run or supported programmes in contexts including Afghanistan, Cambodia, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, and the Palestinian territories. Activities typically include surveying and clearing contaminated land, destroying captured or abandoned ordnance, training national mine action authorities, securing weapons and ammunition stockpiles, and delivering explosive ordnance risk education to civilians, especially children and returning displaced people.

UNMAS is funded primarily through voluntary contributions to the Voluntary Trust Fund for Assistance in Mine Action, alongside assessed peacekeeping budgets when embedded in missions. It reports to the General Assembly, which has adopted biennial resolutions on assistance in mine action since the 1990s. For MUN delegates, UNMAS is frequently referenced in committees handling DISEC, SPECPOL, humanitarian affairs, and country-specific peacekeeping mandates, and is a useful operational hook when drafting clauses on post-conflict recovery, civilian protection, or disarmament.