Are you still employed by the UN? What is your job?
I was still employed when I created this website, and when I spoke to the BBC and Le Monde in October 2021. The UN fired me in November 2021, explicitly for (1) making the policy of giving names of dissidents to Beijing public and (2) trying to change it. I was never, at any point, accused of lying.
Prior to my dismissal, I had been deprived of all functions since October 2019, and after the UN faked an emergency to send armed police to my home in May 2021, they did not even let me report to work.
Of course, depriving me of functions in retaliation for my reports was itself misconduct, as well as fraud. My salary was funded from voluntary contributions to support the Global Compact for Migration. I have no particular expertise in that domain and do not work on migration. Member states contributing to that fund do not do so with the intention that their contributions be used for the purposes of retaliation against a whistleblower. You can find out if your government is contributing here: https://migrationnetwork.un.org/mptf
How can we stop this?
Member states have to investigate. That could be individual parliaments, a group of donors, an independent commission (the latter more difficult because of the position of China as a permanent member of the Security Council).
The UN has shown it is incapable of dealing with serious misconduct in its own ranks. The UN lawyer helpfully repeated the same line eight separate times during court hearings in my case – every single UN senior manager, up to and including the Secretary-General, has heard my reports, knows I am telling the truth, and has not taken any action. In the UN’s internal court system, power is all that matters, not principle, so the lawyer was clearly very pleased with this argument. It was intended to show how very “unreasonable” I am to keep thinking breaking rules set by member states to please Beijing could constitute misconduct in the UN. The inaction itself becomes the justification for more inaction.
Does any other part of OHCHR give names to Beijing, or is it just the Human Rights Council?
Unfortunately yes. I have found, been given, and reported evidence that this also happens for treaty bodies, apparently without the knowledge of the independent experts. Because reports on China are only considered at most every four years, getting evidence for every treaty body would be difficult. I have not seen any evidence of it happening with Special Procedures. Until the UN finally orders an independent, external investigation with the power to access all databases and emails, nobody can be sure.
Why does the UN sometimes say it stopped handing names to Beijing after 2015?
After they already admitted it was ongoing in 2017, UN managers read my (leaked) submissions to the Ethics Office. The managers realised that, in mid-2016, I believed my report to the Irish Ambassador had led to a change in policy. She asked my permission to use my name as the source of the report when she tried to stop it through the Bureau of the Human Rights Council in March 2016.
So, the UN took the opportunity to change its public story and claimed it had stopped. Unfortunately, there is simply no evidence for that. I kept checking communications from the Chinese delegation, all of which show they still know who is coming. The Chinese delegation does not simply magically stop objecting to Tibetan activists speaking out for the very sessions where no Tibetan activist attends.
It’s possible the UN position is “true” to the extent that the information may now be transmitted by another entity. The person in OHCHR who used to transmit names to the Chinese delegation has worked for the central UN Administration in Geneva since 2015, and is in charge of all NGO accreditation for all meetings (not just human rights meetings). She certainly thought it was still happening when I contacted her to verify in 2016.
Quite simply, if the UN had recognised and corrected its mistake and stopped handing over names in 2015, they would not have issued a press release in 2017 admitting it in the present tense, or based their entire court position in 2019 on the fact that it continues.
I am calling for an independent, external investigation. I would be delighted if my reports had worked and someone in UN management cared about complicity in international crimes. But there is no evidence for that, and it would still mean there is no accountability for a full decade of complicity. The UN should come clean and tell the individuals whose names were handed over when exactly it happened, and what exactly the policy currently is. The UN has never responded to any of the activists who have asked for that information.
The UN says it has internal accountability and whistleblower protection, so what are you complaining about?
Some people say the earth is flat. That doesn’t make it true.
This is a cycle that has been repeated for too many years. The UN claims to have accountability and whistleblower protection, then a high-profile scandal shows it does not, so some rules are rewritten by the very people with most to lose by actually having whistleblower protection. UN managers tell diplomats of Member States that all is now well, knowing they will not look in too much detail, until the next cycle when the pattern repeats.
The UN Administration cannot point to a single case of a public interest whistleblower who has been protected. Staff are fully and completely aware of that, so even most of the ethical staff members simply decide to turn the other way, knowing that their reports will not stop misconduct or lead to accountability, but merely signal the end of their own UN careers. This must change.
In my own case, I was finally recognised as a whistleblower in July 2020, with recommendations for my protection. It is entirely up to the UN Administration, as the guilty party, to decide whether or not to implement those recommendations and protect me. Mr. Guterres decided not to. He is supposed to have an obligation to investigate the retaliation against me, but has ignored that, too. Instead, he put me under investigation for daring to blow the whistle. He cannot be held accountable for any of that. Instead, he tries to publicly defame me as somehow not a “bona fide” whistleblower. That’s the UN’s standard tactic – divert attention away from complicity in genocide by defaming the staff member who reported it.
Is the retaliation against you typical?
Unfortunately yes. When the UN management are confronted with evidence of wrongdoing, their reaction is not to address the misconduct, but to cover it up.
It is possible senior managers initially believed the lies of the manager I reported. But that means they did not bother to look at the evidence. Quite simply, nobody wants to deal with this and because there is complete impunity, nobody has to. Senior managers can just keep giving nice speeches about human rights, have their lawyers argue in court that complicity in genocide is not prohibited under UN rules, retaliate against me to try to force me to resign and, when that fails, fire me for blowing the whistle. Nobody wants to deal with the awkwardness of admitting mistakes were made. It is simply more convenient to continue to endanger people. And, because the managers who might be inclined to do the right thing do nothing, the only people who do anything at all are the guilty, who viciously retaliate against whistleblowers to protect themselves and their careers.
The only unusual feature of my case is that I am waiving confidentiality and releasing original documents that show how the UN actually addresses a report of misconduct. Confidentiality exists to protect me, not to protect corrupt UN managers, investigators and Ethics Officers from their own arguments in favour of an indefensible policy.
Every public interest whistleblower gets the same treatment. I actually predicted the investigation into me, because that was the next step in what the UN Human Rights Office did to Anders Kompass when he blew the whistle on child sex abuse. No manager suffered any consequences for the retaliation against him, and the UN Human Rights Office even repeated in my case the exact misconduct that was found in his case, interfering in the independence of the Office of Internal Oversight Services.
Because UN rules prevent me from airing strictly employment grievances in public, I have redacted some information about the retaliation against me. But the documents clearly show reality – internally, the UN admits and defends this policy, even as externally every spokesperson first lies that it never happened, then tries to dismiss admission of at least a decade of complicity in international crimes as a “historic practice.”
The UN says you’re just attention-seeking. Why go public?
I actually hate being the centre of attention. I just want the UN to stop actively placing in danger people it is supposed to protect. When managers refused, I wanted them to at least make public the UN policy of handing names to Beijing, so people could assess risks. I made reports internally first. When that didn’t work I gave the evidence to member states, and only when they reported back that the UN was lying to them did I make reports publicly. I used my real name and title for full transparency, to ensure the UN could not merely refuse to comment on anonymous reports.
At different points since February 2013, I briefly thought my reports had worked and the policy might have changed. At those times, I stopped reporting it externally, but then was always given or found evidence it continued. The UN management has consistently said to me that it stands by the policy, it thinks I was wrong to ever report it, and that it remains entirely within its discretion to pass names to Beijing. In court, the UN says it has a right to publicly lie about the policy to protect its reputation.
After the court hearings in June 2019, I was confident I would win my cases, and that the judgments would lay out the real policy in public. The UN’s legal position in court actually relies on the policy still being in place. I hoped that would be the impetus required for other member states to finally require external investigation over the objections of Beijing, because it would have removed any possible doubt that UN managers continue to lie to member states and the public. But I underestimated the depths of UN corruption. Even I did not think that, when they had so very obviously lost in court, UN managers would actively lie to member states in order to remove the judge without notice to prevent publication of his rulings. Those rulings do exist, and I for one would very much like to see them.
On a personal level, I was due to start a part-time PhD in September 2019, with a view to leaving the UN in 2021, as the fight to show a whistleblower can do the right thing and survive the retaliation has been exhausting. I hoped my cases would lead to reform, but intended to leave that fight to elected staff representatives, hoping that a whistleblower finally winning in court would convince them that they could take on whistleblower cases without necessarily risking an end to their own careers. I had to give up my place on the PhD programme when the UN Administration engineered the removal of the judge, because protecting myself against retaliation is already a second full-time job.
In sum, a side-effect of the utter impunity of its managers is that the UN is quite incredibly incompetent at even the most basic risk management. Instead of quietly solving a problem brought to their attention and allowing me to create a situation where I could leave, managers forced me into a position where the only possible way to ensure a verifiable end to a life-endangering policy is publicity. Happily, by actively depriving me of all meaningful functions in favour of entirely ad-hoc, demotivating, dead-end assignments, managers ensure I now do have enough time to fight for an end to UN impunity.
Do you have support of member states for your candidacy for Secretary-General?
No, but I have asked both the UK and Ireland to nominate me to try to ensure Mr. Guterres faces questions about the corruption and impunity on his watch. The transparency of the last SG selection process seems to have been abandoned, so it is not currently clear even if a candidate does get member state support that the Presidents of the General Assembly and Security Council would actually circulate that person’s application.
Why stand as a protest candidate?
I am a lawyer, not a politician. I want a transparent UN that is accountable to the people on whose behalf it is supposed to work. For there to be any chance of that, candidates need to face difficult questions about the depths of corruption in the organisation and how they plan to change it. Those questions do not generally come from Member States, at least not in public.
The UN should be led by someone who wants that job. I much prefer relative anonymity and effecting concrete changes in the lives of individuals. I have devoted much of my career to trying to prevent and combat torture. I like working on legislative reforms, training law enforcement, or doing prison inspections to try to help the most marginalised in society access their rights, not schmoozing with ambassadors at fancy receptions.
Why don’t you just sue the UN?
Diplomatic immunity. Neither I nor the people whose names are handed to Beijing can sue. Governments are subject to the rule of law, UN managers are not.
Why do you have two nationalities?
I am from Northern Ireland. Like everyone who is born there, I have the right to both Irish and UK citizenship (in alphabetical order).
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