Is the UN safe for whistleblowers?

Yesterday’s Guardian featured a long piece on the case involving a United Nations employee who tried to report corruption involving the UN mission in Kosovo: A landmark case brought by a former United Nations employee against the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, has cast light on what activists describe as a pervasive culture of impunity ...

By , a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

Yesterday's Guardian featured a long piece on the case involving a United Nations employee who tried to report corruption involving the UN mission in Kosovo:

Yesterday’s Guardian featured a long piece on the case involving a United Nations employee who tried to report corruption involving the UN mission in Kosovo:

A landmark case brought by a former United Nations employee against the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, has cast light on what activists describe as a pervasive culture of impunity in an organisation where whistleblowers are given minimal protection from reprisals.

James Wasserstrom, a veteran American diplomat, was sacked and then detained by UN police, who ransacked his flat, searched his car and put his picture on a wanted poster after he raised suspicions in 2007 about corruption in the senior ranks of the UN mission in Kosovo (Unmik).

The UN’s dispute tribunal has ruled that the organisation’s ethics office failed to protect Wasserstrom against such reprisals from his bosses, and that the UN’s mechanisms for dealing with whistleblowers were "fundamentally flawed", to the extent the organisation had failed to protect the basic rights of its own employee.

The relationship between Ban Ki-moon’s office and new UN tribunal has been rocky from the beginning, as Colum Lynch reported in May 2010:

The new system consists of judges on dispute tribunals in New York, Nairobi and Geneva. Their rulings can be appealed to a higher panel of three judges. Its decisions are binding on the secretary general and the 50,000 U.N. staff members.

The new tribunal has proved more efficient than the previous system, producing judgments at a far higher rate. But it has also been a shock to an institution unaccustomed to having the decisions of its chief executive reviewed by an independent court.

Confronting the tribunal’s challenge to executive privilege, Ban’s lawyers have declined to respond to orders they deem unjustified, in the hope that the appeals judges will rule in his favor.

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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