UN whistleblowers face perilous times

I recently met a United Nations (UN) staff member who told me that he had come across incriminating evidence linking a top official with misuse of donor funding. In fact, he suspected that the money had not just been misused, but had been stolen.

I asked him if he could report this to an oversight body within the UN and he told me there would be no point in doing so because he would either be fired or there would be a massive cover-up on the part of the organisation's financial officers, who would find a way of cooking the books to legitimise irregular movement of funds.

He also told me that several UN staff members who had facilitated the alleged theft by the top official had been awarded accelerated promotions.

Now, if these allegations had been made by a government official they might have led to an investigation, or even a dismissal. At the very least, media hype about the case might have forced some people to resign or face a tribunal. But not so with the UN.

I worked for the UN for almost 12 years, and in all that time, I have only seen one case of someone being fired for misappropriation of funds.

In that particular case, the termination was prompted by powerful member states of the UN, who orchestrated a ‘name and shame’ campaign that led to the forced resignation of the official.

It would hardly surprise anyone who has worked within the UN system that the organisation is, as one watchdog website put it, ‘a unique and extreme case of organisational non-accountability’.

Many observers have noted the widening gap between rhetoric and reality within this international organisation.

Since 2005, when the UN Oil-for-Food Programme scandal in Iraq made headlines around the world, various journalists and watchdog organisations have been reporting cases of gross misconduct in the UN's agencies and by senior UN staff, but few of these reports have resulted in the perpetrator being brought to justice.

In one extreme case, a former UN peacekeeper based in Kosovo, who now serves as an anti-corruption officer at an American embassy, claimed that he was fired after reporting suspicions of corruption.

An article published in the New York Times last month claims that he suffered severe retaliation from his colleagues as a result of the reporting, including having his house searched and having posters bearing his picture hung around the UN headquarters to prevent him entering the compound.

Watchdog organisations believe that the UN's internal oversight mechanisms have been severely compromised by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who appears to be reluctant to make decisions regarding cases brought before him.

Last year, a special task force set up to investigate fraud and corruption in the UN was mysteriously closed. Since then, the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) has not completed a single case of fraud or corruption, whilst an average of 150 cases a year had been completed by the task force when it was operational.

A few weeks ago, independent judges appointed to review how the UN makes decisions regarding hiring, firing and promotions accused the UN Secretary General of ‘shielding an unhealthy culture of secrecy’.

Another report released by the UN Joint Inspection Unit (JIU) last month states that ‘recent high-profile cases that have been widely publicised have shown that executive heads can, and do, act with impunity in the absence of effective internal mechanisms to investigate allegations of wrongdoing against them’.

The report further states that since the UN's internal oversight bodies report directly to executive heads, their independence to carry out an investigation or a review of the alleged wrongdoing is seriously circumscribed.

Despite a 2005 policy that protects whistleblowers against retaliation, many UN whistleblowers have reported suffering severe reprisals, including being fired or being pushed into resigning.

Tom Devine, legal director of the Washington-based Government Accountability Project (GAP), a watchdog organisation, was once quoted saying: ‘The United Nations provides staff with fewer rights to defend themselves than any government agency I've encountered, either on the national or international level.’

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* This article was originally published by The Nation.
* Rasna Warah is a writer and journalist based in Nairobi and can be contacted at [email protected].
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