Unsilenced: Unmasking the United Nations’ Culture of Cover-Ups, Corruption and Impunity

By Rasna Warah, Aicha Elbasri and Beatrice Edwards

In a world experiencing increasing conflicts, terrorism and displacement, many people are wondering what the United Nations the organization established in 1945 to save future generations from the scourge of war should or could have done to prevent these disasters from escalating. UNsilenced shows that, in fact, the UN has remained a bystander in many of these conflicts and that peace-building efforts have not only been undermined by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, but also by the UNs many agencies and programmes. The book exposes how, under the guise of development, stability and the war on terror, the UN fails to prevent conflicts in many parts of the world, and in some cases, misleads the public about the scale of a problem.
The book also reveals the web of lies, cover-ups, corruption and impunity within the United Nations that has allowed wrongdoing to continue unabated. Many of these acts of wrongdoing occur or continue because the UN fails to protect whistleblowers; on the contrary, most UN whistleblowers experience severe retaliation.
UNsilenced describes how whistleblowers have been denied justice within the UN system and how the immunity accorded to UN officials and the conflict of interest inherent in the UNs internal justice system allow the perpetrators of criminal or unethical activities to go unpunished. The book is an urgent call for a serious reform of this bureaucratic, arcane and increasingly politicized organization because not doing so constitutes a betrayal of the trust invested in it by the people and countries that depend on it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Mar 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504999939

Rasna Warah

Rasna Warah is a respected columnist with Kenya's Daily Nation newspaper and a former editor with the United Nations.

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2016 Rasna Warah. All rights reserved.

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Cover design by Conrad Mudibo

Published by AuthorHouse 03/14/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5049-9994-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-9993-9 (e)

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

1 INTRODUCTION

Whistleblower Protection At The United Nations:Imperiled Or Improving?

By Beatrice Edwards

2 Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics

3 A Culture Of Denial

4 Immunity Or Impunity?

AFTERWORD

Whistleblowers: Keepers Of The Flame

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. – Martin Luther King Jr.

Hide nothing from the masses of people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories. – Amilcar Cabral, Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts

PREFACE

On 8 April 2015, nine former United Nations employees sent a joint letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon requesting him to review whistleblower protection for UN staff. We had worked for a range of UN agencies and programmes, including UN peacekeeping missions, the UN refugee agency UNHCR and the UN’s city agency UN-Habitat, among others. In our letter we stated:

Each of us has blown the whistle on serious wrongdoing, gross misconduct and even criminal acts at the United Nations. Our collective experience of reporting misconduct in the UN covers sexual exploitation, abuse of power, corruption and other criminal behaviour over a period of more than a decade and a half. Each of us has faced retaliation for reporting the wrongdoing. Our cases are well-known, and sadly, deter others from reporting wrongdoing. This must change.

We told the UN Secretary-General that our collective experience of reporting misconduct within the United Nations had shown us that the UN’s internal system of justice was hostile to whistleblowers, and we called on him to take a range of measures to ensure that whistleblowers’ rights are respected, including providing external independent mechanisms for investigating claims of retaliation against UN whistleblowers.

Put simply, we wrote, the UN system of justice fails whistleblowers, and most of us have been forced to leave the UN to save our livelihoods, our health and our reputations.

To date, we have not received any response from the UN Secretary-General’s office.

A couple of months later, with the support and guidance of Beatrice Edwards and Shelley Walden of the Washington-based watchdog organization called the Government Accountability Project (GAP), we formed an informal group called the UN Whistleblower Coalition, under whose auspices we wrote another letter, this time to the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, David Kaye, and to the US State Department. We requested, among other things, that the Special Rapporteur and the State Department encourage the UN Secretary-General and UN Member States to protect whistleblowers.

The letter stated that because the UN and its international staff enjoy extensive legal immunities, including diplomatic immunity from arrest and prosecution, UN staff members are not able to access national courts or international judicial systems in order to resolve employment disputes or allegations of criminal or illegal activities, and are, therefore, forced to endure lengthy and often expensive internal appeal processes.

These processes, we added, are complicated by a structural conflict of interest because the UN is the defendant in any case brought before its internal justice system i.e. UN oversight bodies and dispute tribunals are housed in and funded by the UN, which presents an insuperable problem in cases where senior UN officials are implicated in wrongdoing. We therefore called for an independent, external mechanism/body to look into and investigate cases of wrongdoing reported by UN whistleblowers.

The letter to the US State Department was prompted by the fact that in January 2015, President Barack Obama had signed into law a bill, the first of its kind, which forces the US State Department to withdraw 15 percent of US funding from any UN agency that fails to adhere to best practices for whistleblowers. According to the law, the 15 percent US contribution to the UN or any of its agencies will not be obligated until the State Department reports that they are implementing best practices for whistleblower protection, including: protection against retaliation for internal and lawful public disclosures; legal burdens of proof; statutes of limitation for reporting retaliation; access to independent adjudicative bodies, including external arbitration; and results that eliminate the effects of proven retaliation.

In our submission, we presented the harrowing cases of several UN whistleblowers who had either been fired, demoted, harassed or forced to resign by their respective organizations as a result of their whistleblowing activities. In most of these cases, the UN’s internal oversight and and justice systems, notably the UN Ethics Office, had failed them. As the Government Accountability Project has reported, the Ethics Office finds prima facie cases of retaliation in less than 10 per cent of the cases it reviews, but substantiates retaliation in less than 3 percent of these cases.

Most of these UN whistleblowers had experienced many of the classic features of retaliation, including ostracism, reprimands, forced transfers, assignment to menial duties, dismissal, non-renewal of contracts and blacklisting. Some had developed chronic health conditions as a result, such as hypertension, while others had been prescribed medication for depression or anxiety. It seemed grossly unfair that those who expose misconduct pay a heavy price while the perpetrators of misconduct not only go undisciplined but are often promoted to higher positions within the organization.

Some of those who have worked with UN whistleblowers or who have been UN whistleblowers themselves then decided to speak out about their experiences and about the experiences of others who had dared to report wrongdoing at the UN and suffered retaliation as a result. This process of becoming unsilenced led to this book.

One would think that the UN, as the bastion of human rights, and as an advocate for global peace and justice, would be more sensitive to the plight of whistleblowers and would be eager to remedy the wrongdoing they expose, if only to save taxpayers’ money lost to fraud, corruption or unethical management practices. Alas, anyone hoping to achieve justice within the UN will be terribly disappointed. The UN whistleblowers featured in this book are a living testimony of the UN’s unwillingness or inability to deliver justice to whistleblowers, even when the evidence of wrongdoing or criminal activities has been overwhelming.

This book will, hopefully, shed light on why whistleblowing at the UN is such a perilous and frustrating activity. However, as Brian Martin, in his review of C. Fred Alford’s book Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power, noted, The whistleblowing experience may destroy illusions about justice in the world, but there remain other ways to create meaning, including collective social action.¹ This book is a type of collective action that is based on the belief that if nothing is done to protect whistleblowers, the UN will remain hobbled by wrongdoing that negatively affects the lives of the most vulnerable people on earth who depend on the UN for emergency assistance, shelter, medical care and other necessities, as well as those who depend on the UN to protect their human rights.

The book is also a call for the revision of the UN Charter and other international conventions that bestow immunity from prosecution to UN staff members, which allow the latter to get away with the most heinous crimes, not just in the countries where they are stationed but also in the countries of which they are nationals. The kind of diplomatic immunity (i.e. impunity) that UN officials enjoy is not even accorded to diplomats and ambassadors, who may escape prosecution in the countries where they are posted, but can face prosecution in their home countries if they are implicated in criminal activities.

Hopefully, this book may also help people and organizations to understand that it is not just the whistleblower who suffers, but so do their families and communities.

This book would not have been possible without the input and support of a range of people, including: Beatrice Edwards and Shelley Walden of the Government Accountability Project, who have tenaciously fought the fight on behalf of UN whistleblowers; the UN Whistleblower Coalition, whose founding members include Mahan Amarnath, Miranda Brown, Cynthia Brzak, Vesna Dzuverovic, Aicha Elbasri, Nasr Ishak, James Pooley, James Wasserstrom and myself; lawyer Edward Flaherty, who has defended UN whistleblowers and whose legal cases have highlighted the inherent injustices within the UN system; Caroline Hunt-Matthes, who is still fighting the good fight after years of being denied justice by the UN; and the husbands, wives, parents, children and friends who did not abandon UN whistleblowers and kept them safe and sane throughout their whistleblowing ordeals.

1

INTRODUCTION

Whistleblower protection at the United Nations:

Imperiled or improving?

BEATRICE EDWARDS

As World War II ended in Europe, Asia and Africa, the Allies took stock of the damage. It was appalling: over 60 million people were dead and at least 70 percent of European infrastructure