UN “Ethics” – Round three. In which UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (your tax dollars pay for at least 22% of everything he does) fails the Ethics test, and the UN outdoes even itself for new highwater marks of hypocrisy. Now the case of the fired whistleblower from the UN Development Program is being handed over, in effect, to some of the very folks on whom he blew the whistle. At the UN, this is called an “independent” review.
To recap, as detailed in the two previous posts: There’s a UN whistleblower out there, Artjon “Tony” Shkurtaj, who spoke up about gross misconduct by the North Korea office of the UN Development Program, or UNDP — now at the core of the Cash for Kim scandal. (During Shkurtaj’s 13-year career with the UNDP, he served as chief of operations in the Pyongyang office from 2004-2006). This March,the UNDP fired him. Shkurtaj went for help to the UN Ethics Office, set up last year to protect whistleblowers against such retaliation as being fired. UN Ethics Director Robert Benson said Shkurtaj had a clear case, deserves whistleblower protection, and that there should a UN investigation into the UNDP retaliation against him. But the UNDP, flagship agency of the UN, is now refusing to recognize the “jurisdiction” of the UN Ethics Office, which reports to the Secretary-General.
Thus did the ball land in the court of Ban Ki-moon, chief administrator of the UN, or so it says in the charter. There was plenty Ban could have done. Ban occupies a prominent stage, and if he chooses to stand up for principle rather than present himself as a pile of mush, he enjoys the advantage that as Secretary-General he cannot be fired. He has not been shy about his views on a variety of topics that are actually not his bailiwick, such as urging us to send more aid to North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, or blaming “climate change” for state-abetted genocide in Sudan.
The current intra-UN dispute over ethics, however, is precisely an administrative matter, and something in which integrity in the top leadership, and backing for the Ethics Director, is sorely needed. This is the moment for Ban to be issuing an immediate high-profile public statement urging the UNDP to respect the findings of the UN Ethics office, and supporting the right of all UN staff, at any of the UN’s gazillion agencies, offices, bureaus, missions and far-flung boondoggle centers to ask for whistleblower protection — the better to ensure honest use of public money and trust.
Instead, Ban has wilted. Since Ethics Director Benson copied Ban in last Friday on his memo urging whistleblower protection for Shkurtaj, Ban has done nothing — zero, zip, nada — to defend the decision of his own Ethics Office, or the right of UN staffers such as Shkurtaj to protection. At today’s noon briefing, Ban’s spokeswoman, Michele Montas (but let’s not blame this on her — let’s keep the focus, she speaks for Ban), explained that this was all a problem of legal “jurisdiction,” that Ban could do nothing, that it was all up to the member states, and that it would now be addressed by the UNDP itself. There, the executive board is now going to look into matters of ethics, and the case of Tony Shkurtaj, by way of the UNDP executive board appointing an “independent review board, or person, or agency.”
“Independent” — ? Who are they kidding? The UNDP is not some transparent outfit with an impartial executive board. The 36-member board is packed with representatives of member states whose officials are rolling in the $5 billion or more worth of funding that flows every year through the UNDP to murky projects, conferences and other UN enterprises around the globe. The board is derelict in its oversight already — no big surprise there, since no board members except the U.S. appear even remotely bothered that the UNDP keeps its internal audits secret from its own board members. This board nodded along with the UNDP management while the outrages detailed by Shkurtaj (and others) were taking place. And this is the board that is now supposed to set the terms and appoint a reviewer as a token that “ethics” is alive and well in the UN system.
In the old movies, they had a better name for this sort of proceeding. They didn’t call it an independent review. They called it a Kangaroo Court.
(More on this, with video clips, on Inner-City Press).
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