The UN Charter-based approach demands the pursuit of the Organization’s triple purpose of (1) peace and security, (2) forward (now-sustainable) development and (3) human rights. None of these purposes is dispensable, but require corresponding action on the part of its specialized agencies, beyond mere technical interventions available and practiced in the academic and corporatist sectors. Ensuring that approach, integrating human rights, is the unique inter-agency mandate of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, her/his Office and its officers.

The 2016 World Humanitarian Summit urged the alignment of humanitarian, development, human rights, and peace and security, and cooperation among actors in those respective fields. Also in 2016, however, OECD member states adopted the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) adopted its Recommendation on the Humanitarian-Development-Peace Nexus, stating the intention to foster greater “resilience” [AR] in fragile contexts and address—if not also to remedy—the root causes of humanitarian challenges. 

The OECD-promoted triple ‘humanitarian-development-peace nexus’ omits and disregards the principles enshrined in the FFA paragraphs 4, 8, 16, 26(v)(viii). Conspicuously, it disregards states’ human rights obligations, indeed obligations at all.

Later in 2019, UNDP also adopted the OECD’s triple nexus, despite the purposes of the UN Charter and the integrity promised in the Vienna Declaration and the coordination mandated to OHCHR. UNDP also established its Nexus Academy in 2021 with the objective to foster a common understanding of the Humanitarian Development Peace Nexus approach through a wide range of stakeholders and partners, including bilaterals, multilateral agencies, and NGOs.