UN peacekeepers visit a remote community in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where Civilian Liaison Assistants (CLAs) work to create a link between the UN Stabilization Mission in the DRC (MONUSCO) and communities whose civilians MONUSCO seeks to protect from violence.
Photo: UN Photo/Myriam Asmani
When UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Tom Fletcher addressed the Security Council on 8 April 2026, one figure should have reframed the entire discussion. More than 1,010 humanitarian workers had been killed across the previous three years, compared with 377 in the three years before that. Nearly a tripling. In 2025, at least 326 were killed across 21 countries. Behind that aggregate sits a smaller, more pointed number that ought to reshape how governments, multilateral agencies, and mission partners think about duty of care. According to the Aid Worker Security Database, 97 percent of aid workers killed in 2025 were national staff. They were people serving their own communities, often under the same conditions of insecurity and displacement as the people they were trying to help.
This is not a statistical anomaly. It is the structural reality of how international missions are staffed, and it has been the reality for a long time. The interpreters, drivers, fixers, logisticians, security guards, medical workers, and program officers who make humanitarian, diplomatic, civilian, and military operations possible are overwhelmingly nationals of the country where the mission operates. They live where missions operate, and unlike international staff, they remain when missions withdraw.
The central failure is conceptual. Duty of care is still treated as episodic, during employment, during crisis, or during evacuation, rather than as a lifecycle responsibility. Local Staff International’s Guidelines for the Rights and Protection of Local Staff in International Missions, launched in March 2026, argue that protection must extend from recruitment through post-mission risk. Recent institutional failures from the United Kingdom and the United States illustrate what happens when that lifecycle approach is absent.
The United Kingdom
On 15 July 2025, the British Defence Secretary lifted a super-injunction that had concealed the existence of a catastrophic 2022 data breach. A Ministry of Defence spreadsheet containing personal details of 18,714 principal applicants to the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy, extending to thousands of family members and associates, had been emailed in error to the wrong recipients in February 2022. The breach was not discovered internally until August 2023. The MoD has since disclosed 49 separate data breaches at the unit handling Afghan applications by August 2025, seven of them serious enough to be reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office.
On 1 July 2025, the United Kingdom closed both the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy and the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme to new applications. The Afghanistan Response Route, the secret pathway created to relocate those most at risk from the breach, was wound down. Approximately 22,000 applications remained pending. UK law firms are now coordinating group legal actions on behalf of more than 1,000 Afghan claimants whose data was exposed. The Government’s own Public Accounts Committee reported in November 2025 that the Ministry of Defence had not done enough to prevent further breaches. The Committee also noted that the overall cost of UK Afghan resettlement could exceed £5 billion. The protection costs of failure are not theoretical.
The United States
Since 20 January 2025, nearly every legal pathway relied upon by Afghan wartime allies has been suspended, narrowed, or functionally erased. The #AfghanEvac coalition, representing more than 250 organisations, described the dismantling as “an intentional betrayal of those we swore to stand with” in an open letter to American veterans in February 2025. That campaign has intensified through 2026 as further restrictions have been introduced. On 16 December 2025, Presidential Proclamation 10998 fully suspended visa issuance to nationals of 19 countries, including Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen, with partial suspensions for an additional 20 countries, effective 1 January 2026. For Afghans who served alongside coalition forces, including interpreters and locally engaged staff, the cumulative effect is the closure of pathways that were promised to them in exchange for that service.
What the pattern tells us
These are not isolated administrative failures. They are predictable outcomes of treating duty of care as a function of immigration policy, contracting law, or political will at a given moment, rather than as an obligation that attaches to the act of recruitment itself. When the relationship begins, it begins with a promise of mutual responsibility. That promise does not expire when a mission ends, when an embassy closes, when a scheme is closed to new applications, or when a government changes hands.
The Guidelines for the Rights and Protection of Local Staff in International Missions, published in March 2026 by Local Staff International and co-published with the University of York, establish principles and minimum standards across the full lifecycle of local staff engagement, before recruitment, during employment, during crisis, during evacuation, and after the mission ends. The accompanying legal research report by Sara de Jong and Betsy Fisher, Falling Between the Cracks of Law: Legal Protection and Advocacy for Local Staff, maps the legal terrain in which these obligations are routinely lost.
The Guidelines’ central proposition is that duty of care must apply across all phases of engagement and cannot be reduced or transferred through contracting arrangements. That sentence carries weight because it answers the most common evasion. When a mission ends, when funding cycles close, when administrations change, the obligation to people who took on risk in the mission’s name does not transfer with the contract. It does not lapse with the funding cycle. It does not become someone else’s problem.
The lifecycle frame is doing work that single-issue advocacy on visas or evacuation alone cannot do. It shifts the conversation from emergency response to enduring responsibility, and it gives governments, multilateral agencies, and mission partners a shared standard against which their own practices can be measured.
What the lifecycle frame requires of institutions
For governments operating diplomatic networks, this means treating locally engaged staff not as a separate employment class with thinner protections, but as part of the duty owed by the sending state. Canada offers a useful example. Global Affairs Canada manages more than 5,500 locally engaged staff across its diplomatic and consular missions, and the Department of National Defence manages over 100 in foreign military support units. Global Affairs Canada’s 2024 evaluation of its Duty of Care envelope found unaddressed risks across the mission network, identified health, safety and well-being as areas not sufficiently covered, and flagged a lack of clarity among departmental stakeholders about Canada’s specific legal duty of care responsibilities to locally engaged staff and contractors, an uncertainty the evaluation notes could increase risks to these groups during a crisis. The Locally Engaged Staff Employment Regulations, 2024 address employment standards but leave unanswered questions about post-employment protection in a crisis.
For multilateral agencies, the lifecycle frame means investing in the systems that allow national staff to make informed decisions about risk, including timely information sharing, secure data handling, and pre-positioned options for evacuation or relocation when conditions deteriorate. The April 2023 evacuation of Khartoum offers a cautionary case. Several Western embassies evacuated their international staff while taking different approaches to their locally engaged staff. The Swiss embassy in Khartoum employed about 50 local staff but, per its own policy, did not evacuate them. Sweden, Italy, and others took similar approaches. The State Department’s Office of Inspector General later found that the U.S. embassy’s emergency planning had not adequately accounted for the volume of sensitive materials requiring destruction during evacuation, and that the Department could not provide a definitive accounting of the passports and documents destroyed. Whether these decisions are reasonable is a duty of care question that should be answered before the crisis, not improvised during it.
For NGOs and humanitarian agencies, the lifecycle frame is colliding with a deteriorating security environment that is reaching national staff most acutely. UNRWA has now confirmed 391 colleagues killed in Gaza since the start of the war, comprising 310 UNRWA personnel and 81 supporting staff. In Ukraine, the Danish Refugee Council lost two Ukrainian colleagues in a Russian missile strike on a humanitarian demining mission in Chernihiv Oblast in September 2025. The following month, Russian forces used first-person-view drones to attack a clearly marked UN inter-agency convoy delivering aid to Bilozerka in the Kherson region. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, three local HEKS/EPER employees were killed during a humanitarian mission in North Kivu in February 2025. These are not isolated incidents. They are the texture of national staff exposure in active conflicts.
The policy window in 2026
The launch of the LSI Guidelines, the closing of resettlement pathways in major NATO contributor states, the rising visibility of national staff casualties, and the upcoming International Day of UN Peacekeepers on 29 May, under the theme “Invest in Peace,” all create the conditions for sustained advocacy. The argument that connects them is not new. It is that the people who carry the most risk in international missions deserve protection structures that match that risk, and that those structures must be built into the design of the mission, not improvised at its end.
Local Staff International exists to make that argument legible to governments, NGOs, multilateral agencies, and the veterans communities that have been some of its most consistent advocates. The Guidelines provide the practical instrument. The 97 percent provides the moral weight.