• Collaboration with UN peacekeeping operations remains fundamental to the successful monitoring of arms embargoes, but UN country mission support to PoEs is highly uneven.
• The recruitment of qualified and self-motivated experts remains an essential factor in the PoEs’ ability to function effectively. Much depends on the skills, talents, and underlying motivations of specific individuals.
• PoE members described numerous impediments to their investigations, such as target governments’ preventing panel members from following investigation leads by denying them access to specific areas, and lack of responses to requests for information.
• UN-provided investigative methodology guidelines have not evolved significantly over the past few years, but arms experts and their PoE colleagues continue to develop innovative methods to assess and quantify evidence of embargo violations.
• The UN Secretariat has taken steps in improving its support to PoEs, but the administrative support structure has not kept pace with the expanding set of duties they are expected to fulfil.
• Almost all the experts said that the brevity of their employment term—one year on paper, but in practice shorter—limits the actual investigation period in some cases to seven or eight months.

The new report, Monitoring UN Arms Embargoes: Observations from Panels of Experts, points to a need for continued reform efforts regarding the oversight, management, and access prerogatives of panels. Many of these efforts are outlined in the High Level Review of United Nations Sanctions (2015). The launch of the report coincides with a roundtable event in preparation for the release of a one-year follow-up assessment of progress towards implementing the recommendations of the high-level review. The event, co-sponsored by the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, is being held during the Geneva Peace Week.