50 Compendium: High Level Review of United Nations Sanctions A. Peacekeeping operations, special political missions and the Secretary-General’s special representatives In situations where the Council has applied sanctions to a State in which it has also deployed a field mission (peacekeeping operation or a special political mission), the Council requires field missions to cooperate in the implementation of the sanctions. Field missions are generally mandated to assist, within their capabilities, committees and expert groups by supplying relevant information. Peacekeeping operations, where relevant, may also be mandated to monitor implementation of arms embargoes, including through inspections of weapons, ammunition and related materiel regardless of location (cf. MINUSCA, MONUSCO, UNOCI). The Secretariat’s IAWG addressed interactions between field missions and sanctions actors in the field. Overall, a good understanding of the sanctions regime, its scope and the ways in which the mission could assist in furthering compliance existed; similarly, consultations with expert groups suggested that field missions provided vital logistical support for expert groups’ activities and that collaboration on implementation assessments and investigations generally occurred. In some cases, however, field missions were either unaware of the role of expert groups or the mission’s mandate to cooperate with them, or were unwilling to assist expert groups out of concern for the potential negative consequences for the mission, particularly its relationship with the host government, if it were associated with UN sanctions. Other HLR participants noted a lack of harmony between the functions of a peacekeeping mission and Council-mandated sanctions, with rules for such missions determined by the C-34 Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations, reflecting the desire of troop and police contributing countries not to be involved in sanctions implementation. The sanctions function was thus viewed as “standalone” rather than integral to the overall UN mission. Recommendations were advanced to address such issues by including sanctions functions in pre-deployment training for new staff or with the advent of a new sanctions regime. The IAWG noted that, despite several peacekeeping missions having mandated arms embargo inspection or sanctions monitoring tasks, there was little work being done to extract best practices from the experience of monitoring units in peacekeeping missions. Such lessons could be valuable, for example, in devising a common template for recording of data on arms and ammunition that could be shared among mis-