UN retaliation against whistleblowers is a systematic and necessary element to preserve cover-ups and impunity of managers. It consists of a number of elements:
- Ignore inconvenient facts
- Ignore ethical principles and UN rules
- Marginalise, defame and discredit the whistleblower
- Ignore any recommendations for protection
- Place the whistleblower under retaliatory investigation
- Stop any accountability mechanism that starts to work in the whistleblower’s favour
As I have remained employed longer than any other UN whistleblower I know of, my case has now reached a new, unexpected, stage. The UN is now using national authorities to retaliate against me, making a false report of an emergency to the Swiss police, who illegally entered my home with firearms. The UN claimed “concern” for my health, but had not contacted me, my emergency contact, or my doctor, all of whom would have told them not to introduce firearms as a tool of retaliation.
Ignore inconvenient facts
Reporting wrongdoing in the UN resembles banging your head off a wall. Managers quite simply do not care about truth or facts, but only preservation of the reputation of the UN and their own careers. As one example, listen to a legally recorded call with the current Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, Nada al-Nashif, in June 2020. She only cared about delivering a message that I should be quiet, under threat of dismissal. She very clearly did not remotely care about the deliberate, ongoing endangerment of human rights advocates by people under her direct supervision. This call is also, incidentally, the only time OHCHR has ever claimed internally that the policy changed. I asked that, if this is its new position, the UN amend its position before the Tribunal that the policy remains in place. The UN did not change its sworn position. A transcript of the call is here.
One important admission is made during the call, although it follows a number of lies that this policy only applied to “well-known” activists (students and interns?), that risk assessments were done at any point, etc. The Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights explicitly admits that the UN Human Rights Office still believes it is not bound by rules set by member states, but can unilaterally decide to secretly hand names of human rights advocates to any government that wants to intimidate them and their families to prevent them speaking out. This decision, as she states, remains with the Chief of the Human Rights Council Branch – the very person who started handing over names in 2006, and took the decision to continue doing so over my objections in 2013. How likely is it that whatever his personal motivations were for doing so have changed? Why will the UN not investigate?
The UN approach to my reports is a cycle:
Ignore ethical principles and UN rules
In response to previous scandals, the UN was forced to adopt a policy on whistleblower protection. This policy is designed to be ineffective. If you don’t believe me, listen to the Director of Investigations telling his staff precisely how the policy will not be applied. Instead of investigating retaliation against whistleblowers, the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) simply sends all of the evidence to the primary retaliator and asks for a promise they are not guilty. That’s it. And the reason is explicit – it is to “get the U.S. off the UN’s back” and ensure they do not withhold funding because of a lack of whistleblower protection, as (previously) required under U.S. law. A transcript of the recording is here, with explanation of some of the acronyms.
Under the whistleblower protection policy, Ethics Officers are supposed to decide if the complainant has a prima facie case, which means basically a quick look to check if the person reported wrongdoing, and suffered retaliation as a result. If yes, the case if referred for the “investigation” outlined above. That quick check is supposed to take 30 days, but in my case took 595. I applied for whistleblower protection in July 2016. Three different Ethics Officers looked at my case, and came to increasingly unethical decisions about why it was impossible for any reasonable person to ever believe that secretly handing names of human rights advocates to Beijing without their knowledge or consent could be a problem:
- In October 2016, the Director of the UN Ethics Office, Elia Armstrong (still in post) found that no reasonable person could ever believe this to be misconduct because the policy did not change after I reported it. Note the date – someone in OHCHR admitted it was ongoing in 2016. She argued that because in 2015 an independent investigation had found that a senior OHCHR manager was correct to transmit names of victims of child sex abuse to the French government to enable investigation of the crime and protection of the victims, the Chief of the Human Rights Council Branch must have been correct to secretly transmit names of human rights advocates to the Chinese government to enable intimidation of the advocates and their families. She saw no ethical distinction whatsoever relating to the purpose for which the information would be used. Her report is here.
- In April 2017, the then head of the UNFPA Ethics Office, Katrina Campbell, agreed that no reasonable person could ever believe this to be misconduct because the policy did not change when I reported it. Her report is here, and a response sent to the Secretary-General by the Government Accountability Project (GAP) is here. GAP point out that “This reply is equivalent to saying that, at the UN, there is no specific regulation that prohibits a staff member from shoving a colleague out a window. Therefore, should one staff member report another for doing this, he or she has not reported misconduct. Because a witness to the defenestration is not interviewed, there does not exist any evidence that the whistleblower believed that the action merits investigation and discipline.”
- In April 2018, the then head of the Unicef Ethics Office, Ursula Wellen (now at the OECD), went a step further. She expressly found that is is acceptable for senior managers in the UN Human Rights Office to simply ignore ethical principles like “do no harm,” confidentiality, and equal application of rules to all member states in order to improve relations with the Chinese government. She considered it impossible for any reasonable person to believe that laws and human rights could ever trump politics. Her report is here.
Nothing any UN Ethics Officer ever decides, no matter how unreasonable, and no matter how many rules they broke in reaching the decision, can ever be challenged. That was confirmed in my court case, with the UN’s preferred judge finding that the case was non-receivable, i.e. the court was not even competent to look at the legal issues raised, and whether it is indeed reasonable to secretly hand names of human rights advocates to the Chinese government. The original, independent judge, who actually heard the evidence, was very likely to look at the reasonableness of the decisions, so the UN removed him without any notice whatsoever in July 2019 (see below).
For a time, the retaliation against me in OHCHR was led by the former Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, Kate Gilmore. Based on our interactions with her, I and another whistleblower doubted she could really hold the impressive qualifications she claimed, so we Googled her. It was immediately clear from the UN’s own press releases that her qualifications had been magically improving with each appointment, apparently without anyone checking. When appointed to UNFPA in 2012, the UN press release claimed Ms Gilmore held “a bachelor’s degree in social work from the University of Melbourne, Australia, a Bachelor of Arts from the University of New England, Australia, and has pursued post-graduate studies in social work and community development in Australia.” The press release announcing her appointment as Deputy High Commissioner in 2015 upgraded her qualifications, claiming she was now “the holder of a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of New England and a post-graduate degree in social work from the University of Melbourne.” When she took up her functions, the OHCHR website added yet another postgraduate degree, this time claiming she “holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of New England and postgraduate degrees in Social Work from the University of Melbourne and Community Development from RMIT.” By simply contacting the universities, we were able to confirm that Ms Gilmore does not hold any postgraduate degree. Records of disciplinary processes show every junior staff member who publicly lied about their qualifications was dismissed from the UN. In the case of a senior official, OHCHR simply updated their website, removing the false claim that had been in place for four years.
Ms Gilmore, of course, retaliated by having me forcibly transferred to a non-existent post within a month. Surely even the Ethics Office could not fail to see a link? Wrong. Of course Ms Armstrong could close her eyes to such blatant retaliation. But I appealed her decision to another ethics officer. And my case was transferred to the only Ethics Officer in the UN to have demonstrated actual ethics in this saga, Helmut Buss of UNHCR. Not only did he find that this was retaliation, but he linked it to the ongoing retaliation since 2013, and found that I could indeed reasonably believe that actively endangering human rights advocates could be misconduct in the UN. His full report is here, but it is worth quoting his main conclusion:
“the management was naturally and perhaps primarily interested in good relations with the member state; the Complainant was interested in human rights and protection of human rights activists. OHCHR was, by virtue of the Complainant’s whistleblowing, placed in a very awkward diplomatic position by a human rights issue that it struggled to handle well. A whistleblower’s reporting of such a practice, which was contrary to fundamental UN principles and values, is exactly the sort of activity that must be protected; it is far more important than minor infractions of bureaucratic rules, which the system finds it much more easy to classify as protected.”
UPDATE: Extraordinarily, only four days after this website went live, the Ethics Panel of the United Nations, apparently acting on the instructions of senior managers, unilaterally declared that it considers this reasoning “defective” (see Breaking News tab). The UN position therefore remains that handing names of human rights advocates to Beijing without their knowledge and consent, against the rules set by member states, is entirely ethical, and any suggestion otherwise is “unreasonable.”
Marginalise, defame and discredit the whistleblower
After years of marginalisation, I have had no functions at all since October 2019, when I was forcibly transferred to a non-existent post. I have never worked on migration, but my salary is (illegally) funded from voluntary donations intended for implementation of the Global Compact for Migration. I have pointed out to UN managers that this is fraud. They know they can act with impunity, and so take no action.
UN managers rely on the silence of whistleblowers in the face of more direct, personal abuse. They tried to guarantee silence by making this rule:
It would not be proper for international civil servants to air personal grievances or
Standards of conduct for the international civil service, para. 37.
criticize their organizations in public. International civil servants should endeavour at all
times to promote a positive image of the international civil service, in conformity with
their oath of loyalty.
I can legitimately waive the confidentiality of some documents in my own case in order to prove the need for reform which is at the centre of my protest candidacy for Secretary-General. However, publishing some of the more personally insulting communications would fall into the trap of airing “personal grievances,” and UN managers will be seeking any excuse to retaliate further for this website. However, abuse and defamation of whistleblowers is standard UN policy, so I can (with permission) make public some documents from a case concerning other whistleblowers in the UN Human Rights Office. Their grievances are, after all, not my “personal grievances.”
In 2015, a UN cover-up of sexual abuse of children by peacekeepers was revealed. The UN retaliated against the manager who reported the abuse to national authorities, Anders Kompass, and the staff member who blew the whistle on both the child rape and the UN’s subsequent treatment of Mr. Kompass, Miranda Brown. A rare external investigation was conducted, which exonerated the whistleblower and found the former High Commissioner for Human Rights, Prince Zeid, had pursued him with the same “single-minded determination” he would subsequently apply to retaliating against me.
However, formal exoneration does not end UN retaliation against whistleblowers. Two years after the investigation reached its conclusions, in response to a press query, the UN spokesperson, acting in his official capacity, defamed the whistleblowers in emails to a journalist as “shi**y,” “dishonest,” “duplicitous,” and “in bed with the French” (Mr. Kompass was at the time Ambassador of Sweden to Guatemala). The UN response was as laughable as ever in an organisation with complete impunity. According to the UN, the emails sent from his professional account, during working hours, in response to a formal request for comment, were somehow to be understood as his “personal views” and therefore were not subject to UN rules, memo here. The UN’s preferred judge in my case also handled the challenge to that. She was incapable of seeing a link to the employment relationship, judgment here.
For the record, as UN management will be reading, this website contains my personal views.
Ignore any recommendations for protection
Numerous internal mechanisms have recommended my immediate protection against further retaliation. These include the UN’s own medical services, ombudsman and staff counsellor. I am also the only UN staff member regarding whom an independent UN expert has made an appeal for protection to the Secretary-General, explicitly recommending my immediate protection. Following the recommendations of an Ethics Officer in 2018, the Secretary-General himself became involved in my case, instructing the former High Commissioner for Human Rights, Prince Zeid, to implement the recommendations. He refused. The Secretary-General then apparently rescinded his instructions, and himself refused to apply even the very limited protective measures recommended by the Ethics Officer in July 2020 (my follow-up letter to the Secretary-General is here), preferring to continue the cover-up. While the policy requires investigation of the retaliation against me, the Secretary-General refuses to refer it externally, or even to allow the investigation to begin.
Repeated commitments and promises that recommendations would be followed turned out to be false, as did even sworn witness testimony from the Chief of Human Resources of OHCHR. There is, of course, no consequence for the managers who lie and retaliate.
Place the whistleblower under retaliatory investigation
When defamation has not succeeded in killing a story, the UN will then place a whistleblower under retaliatory “investigation.” The UN manager who wants to retaliate has the right to hand-pick two “investigators” to do their bidding. In my case, Catherine Pollard, the UN head of management, who according to UN rules is supposed to have been under investigation for retaliation against me since July 2020, placed me under investigation in January 2021. Under UN rules, she in fact has no right whatsoever to place me under investigation, but the UN just ignores all rules. She thought the very best person to lead the “investigation” would be a retired former head of human resources who had quite literally been found by a UN tribunal to use investigations for the purpose of retaliation.
Of course, the UN simply ignored all of my detailed objections, pointing out all of the rules that were broken. Nobody will even respond as to whether or not I am still under investigation. My report of abuse of authority by Ms Pollard remains without response from the Secretary-General, despite an earlier court ruling finding that he does not have the authority to simply ignore all UN rules in my case. That complaint is here.
Stop any accountability mechanism that starts to work in the whistleblower’s favour
Very occasionally, some individuals within the UN accountability systems act with the independence they are supposed to show. When that happens, the UN either removes them or stops the process.
My court cases were heard before the UN’s internal employment tribunal in June 2019, by a highly experienced, respected and independent judge, Judge Rowan Downing of Australia. The UN position was that the UN Administration was powerless to resist the request from the Chinese delegation, and that all requested names had to be handed over, without exception, as a policy. This position that the policy continues, which all evidence suggests is true, is obviously not at all compatible with the UN’s ever-changing public position. Judge Downing, over vehement objections from the UN lawyers, allowed examination of the content of the policy during the hearings. The lawyers were clearly concerned. In late June 2019, election of new judges was brought forward from December to July. The Executive Director of the Office of Administration of Justice, acting on behalf of the Secretary-General, appears to have lied to the General Assembly, claiming that the terms of current judges would run until the end of July, that they were aware of their imminent removal, and that the election would be cost-neutral. She knew all three statements to be false. On 10 July 2019, after he had drafted judgments in my cases, but before they were made public, Judge Downing was informed his contract had ended and he should stop all work on my cases. An updated version of my (ignored) complaint regarding his removal is here.
In July 2020, I was interviewed by internal UN auditors who were evaluating accountability mechanisms. The auditors communicated to me that they would use my case as the primary example of failure of those mechanisms to protect public interest whistelblowers. OHCHR managers became aware that I had been interviewed, and pressured the allegedly independent auditors to stop their work, and not to report the truth to the General Assembly. Again, the Secretary-General has declined to investigate.
The UN’s efforts at a cover-up seem even to extend to expulsion of journalists who dare to try to hold them to account. On the very day a journalist from Inner City Press reported on and asked about my request that the Secretary-General lift the immunity of UN spokespeople so I may sue them for defamation, the journalist was permanently banned from UN premises.
The UN does not control national jurisdictions. On the one occasion that my case was considered by a national court, after the Dutch Foreign Minister unknowingly repeated UN lies, I won. The Secretary-General refuses to lift the immunity of the retaliators or allow external investigation because he already knows what the outcome would be. It is indeed embarrassing for the UN to be revealed as complicit in an ongoing genocide. I suggest the appropriate remedy is to stop the complicity, not double down on the cover-up.