Day of the Peacekeeper 2024: Paying tribute to Germans working in international peace missions​​​​​​​

To mark the Day of the Peacekeeper, Boris Pistorius, Federal Minister of Defence, Annalena Baerbock, Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs, and Nancy Faeser, Federal Minister of the Interior and Community, are today honouring three soldiers, three civilian experts and three police officers who have served in international peace missions abroad. They represent all those involved in peace missions, who often face difficult living and working conditions. The three ministries have marked the Day of the Peacekeeper every year since 2013 as a way of expressing their gratitude and respect to all German peacekeepers.

This year, the peacekeepers being honoured have worked in Lebanon (UNIFIL), South Sudan (UNMISS), the Special Criminal Court of the Central African Republic, Armenia (EUMA), Kosovo (UNMIK) and Somalia (EUCAP Somalia). Their tasks are just as varied as the places where they work and range from providing military training and tackling arms smuggling to dispensing justice at an international court of justice and helping to develop an inclusive legal system, as well as carrying out patrols and seeking to prevent interethnic crimes.

Germany is taking responsibility for peace and security around the world. It makes substantial contributions to peace missions. There are 639 soldiers, 170 seconded civilian experts, numerous other Germans directly employed by the UN as well as 67 police officers currently deployed on missions. Moreover, Germany is the fourth-largest contributor (6.1%) to the overall UN peacekeeping budget and the second-largest contributor (11%) to the OSCE budget, from which OSCE field operations and offices as well as institutions are financed. In addition, Germany makes the biggest contribution of any EU member state, around 25% of the total, to financing civilian and military missions and operations under the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy, and also participates in NATO operations and missions.

Background information: The United Nations is the world’s most important organisation for preserving security and peace. UN peace missions are legitimated by the international community, have been proven to reduce violence in their deployment areas and are by far the most cost-effective instrument in international crisis management. UN peacekeeping measures thus remain a key element of Germany’s security policy. Germany is engaged on an extensive scale in peacekeeping reform with the aim of making UN operations safer and more effective. What is more, the Federal Ministry of Defence and the Federal Foreign Office, in collaboration with the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community, will be hosting the world’s most important and highest-level meeting for UN peace missions, the UN Peacekeeping Ministerial, in Berlin next year.