UN gets first-ever woman police chief

New York, Mar 9 : UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Monday appointed an experienced Swedish police officer as the top United Nations police official, marking the first time in the world body's history that a woman has ever held the position.

Ann-Marie Orler, who first came to the UN to serve as Deputy Police Adviser in 2008, has been Acting Police Adviser since last year.

"The UN's top cop is a woman," Ban told reporters in New York, noting that the announcement coincides with International Women's Day.

In her native Sweden, Orler served as the Secretary General of the non-governmental organization (NGO) Amnesty International and was also the Police Commissioner in the town of Västmanland.

On the international stage, she has worked as the Programme Manager for Police and Human Rights with the Council of Europe, where she took part in fact-finding missions and trained police officers in Turkey and several Balkan nations, among others.

The Secretary-General hailed her work in leading "the global effort to recruit more female police officers for UN peace operations."

At present, there are 11,000 UN Police (UNPOL) - 8 per cent of whom are women - from some 100 countries who working in 18 different field missions.

When she first joined the UN, Orler pointed to the particular challenge of recruiting female police officers.

In a bid to boost their recruitment, she told the UN News Centre that she would examine the underlying causes of why there are relatively few women in UNPOL, and then determine "what we can do as an organization to make it more attractive and more possible for women to join."