The UN, corruption, and accountability
Reacting to a new article on accountability in international organizations, Kenneth Anderson lets rip: [I]nternational organizations such as the UN have massive structural agency failure problems. That is a somewhat anodyne way of putting it; the problems range from rent-seeking to major criminal corruption and fraud. They arise from a treaty structure deliberately designed to ...
Reacting to a new article on accountability in international organizations, Kenneth Anderson lets rip:
Reacting to a new article on accountability in international organizations, Kenneth Anderson lets rip:
[I]nternational organizations such as the UN have massive structural agency failure problems. That is a somewhat anodyne way of putting it; the problems range from rent-seeking to major criminal corruption and fraud. They arise from a treaty structure deliberately designed to shield the organization and its agents from judicial accountability — for perfectly understandable reasons, to be sure. And from the predictable “capture” of internal review mechanisms. The result is to put the UN and international organizations and their agents in fundamental ways outside of the rule of law in the most ordinary sense. That’s not too strong a way of putting it. But again, this receives remarkably little attention from academics. The reflexive position of observers tends to be to define today’s deviancy down, discounting today against the glorious, but always-receding, always-promised future of international institutions. Mostly, I think, people just want to focus on the idealistic stuff about tomorrow and plug up their ears about anything that actually happens today.
I haven’t read the article he’s reacting to yet, so I’ll withhold judgment on that. And I don’t disagree with all aspects of what Anderson says. But his principal exhibit is the Oil-for-Food scandal, which makes me somewhat skeptical. Of course, there was some corruption in the UN Secretariat associated with the program (there were also Secretariat officials unfairly accused). But the broader cause of Oil-for-Food’s failure—to the extent it was a failure—was Security Council division and negligence. Key Council members insisted that their national companies be hired to monitor the program, sometimes in violation of UN procurement rules. The Security Council repeatedly failed to ensure compliance and to react to Saddam’s abuses. The Security Council winked at oil importation by certain favored countries. The Security Council failed for months to name a full slate of monitors to keep an eye on contracts. And in the program’s later stages, certain key Council members were in open revolt against the entire sanctions regime. The Secretariat could have been squeaky clean and it wouldn’t have saved the program.
None of this speaks directly to whether internal UN accountability procedures are adequate (I do not doubt that they are not). But it does speak to the relative size of the problem and the significance of the corruption that does exist. Too often, Oil-for-Food is used to insinuate that a major international initiative failed because of the venality of UN employees. In reality, the problem was much deeper and, ultimately, much harder to solve.
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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