Whistleblower Claim Threatens To Unravel U.N. Compromise

September 6, 2007
Whistleblower Claim Threatens To Unravel U.N. Compromise

BY BENNY AVNI - Staff Reporter of the SunSeptember 6, 2007

URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/62029

UNITED NATIONS — A claim by a former U.N. Development Program employee who says his superiors retaliated against him after he exposed wrongdoing threatens to unravel a compromise that so far has allowed the agency to escape the rulings of the U.N. office charged with whistleblowers' protection.

The former UNDP official in western Africa, Mathieu Credo Koumoin, who claims he was dismissed by the agency in December 2006 because of his efforts to alert his superiors to violations of the agency rules, wrote a letter on Tuesday to the chief U.N. ethics officer, Robert Benson, asking for whistleblower protection.

The new request presents a challenge to the UNDP claim that because the ethics office has no jurisdiction over it, it will not submit to Mr. Benson's judgment, a professor at John Jay College who is representing Mr. Koumoin, Jeanne Marie Col, said.

Ms. Col said Mr. Koumoin was encouraged to approach Mr. Benson after a union representing U.N. employees around the world passed a resolution last week that called on Secretary-General Ban to instruct the UNDP and its administrator to "submit" to the jurisdiction of the ethics office.

Established last year, one of the ethics office's top tasks is to allow staffers to expose wrongdoing without fear of retaliation. Last month, as the UNDP struggled with the North Korea scandal, Mr. Benson offered to rule on one such case, which involved the former UNDP office manager in Pyongyang, Artjon Shkurtaj.

Mr. Shkurtaj's contract was not renewed by the agency after he exposed rule violations in North Korea. The evidence supports a "prima facie" case that there was retaliation against Mr. Shkurtaj, Mr. Benson wrote to the UNDP administrator, Kemal Dervis on August 17.

But Mr. Benson also noted that "technically" his office has no jurisdiction over the independently funded UNDP. The agency seized on that technicality. Rather than submitting to the ethics office, UNDP spokesmen said, an "independent" investigator, who would be named later by the agency's board of auditors, would examine all allegations surrounding the North Korea program, including the circumstances of Mr. Shkurtaj's dismissal.

On Friday, a worldwide union of staffers, the U.N. International Civil Servants Federation, joined the New York-based Staff Union in a call for Mr. Ban to reinstate Mr. Shkurtaj "immediately" and "to instruct the administrator of UNDP to submit to the jurisdiction" of the ethics office.

"The staff resolution encouraged us," Ms. Col, who helped Mr. Kuomoin draft the letter to the ethics office, said. A former U.N. employee herself, she now teaches public administration and protection management. The U.N. ethics office will lose its power if the UNDP is allowed to maintain the position that the office has no jurisdiction over it, she said.

"It's like saying I'm doing 140 miles an hour, and the speed limit does not apply to me," Ms. Col told The New York Sun yesterday. She declined to discuss the specifics of Mr. Kuomoin's case, saying instead that the fight over jurisdiction "becomes a test case for how effective the ethics office is."

For her, this is not merely an academic statement. In 2003, Ms. Col came across some wrongdoing at the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, where she worked. Rather than putting up a fight against the system, she chose to quit the organization and go back to her teaching career. "I didn't blow the whistle," she said. "I felt that the cards were against me."
While she had to go "on a diet" after a major salary cut, Ms. Col said, she did have a career to fall back on. This is not the case with many U.N. employees, which is why the U.N.'s ethics office should be strengthened, she said. No similar whistleblower protection mechanism exists at the UNDP, Mr. Kuomoin said in the letter to Mr. Benson, which Ms. Col helped to draft.

The cases of Messrs. Shkurtaj and Kuomoin "may not be isolated and special, but rather symptomatic of weaknesses in accountability and oversight" at the UNDP, Ms. Col wrote yesterday in a separate letter to the Danish ambassador to the United Nations, Carsten Staur, who heads the agency's board of directors. A UNDP spokesman, David Morrison, said yesterday that Mr. Kuomoin's case is pending before the U.N. Joint Appeal Board. "We are awaiting the outcome," he said. Disputing Mr. Kuomoin's letter, Mr. Morrison told the Sun that the UNDP has "its own whistleblower protection mechanisms" that "have been used successfully by staff members in the past."