At Town Hall, Secretary-General reflects on his vision and the way ahead for UN reform

---

Posted: Wednesday, 14 September 2011, New York | Author: iSeek/David Mimran

The Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, held a Town Hall meeting today in New York with staff from duty stations across the world attending by video conference, to share his reflections on his first term and his vision for strengthening the United Nations during his second term. Questions and comments focused particularly on security, budget cuts and mobility.

“I am honoured to be part of this incredible Secretariat of thousands of different people from different countries working for the same cause”, said Ban Ki-moon in his opening remarks. Mr Ban was accompanied on the podium by the Deputy Secretary-General, Ms. Asha-Rose Migiro and Under Secretary-General for Management, Ms. Angela Kane. Mrs. Ban attended in the audience.

At the beginning of the new General Assembly session, the Secretary-General had invited staff to a Global TownHall meeting to come together and talk about the “state of the world and our United Nations -- where we are, where we are going”.

Before sharing his vision for his second term, the Secretary-General recalled the tragic events of the bombing of the UN House in Abuja: “This attack demonstrates that we now face determined, immoral extremists, opposed to the basic principles of the United Nations, in even low-threat countries around the world”, he said. He pledged to call on Member States to do more to ensure adequate security for UN personnel everywhere.

Staff observed a minute of silence in honour of colleagues lost in the line of duty, including in Afghanistan, Bolivia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Nigeria and Sudan.

Reform Plan

The Secretary-General then shared what he called “the state of his thinking”, lessons learned from his first term and the vision for the road ahead.

“My plan is to move from talking about “what” we must do, to detailing “how” we will do it, through a plan of action to be unveiled in January. Over the next five years, I want us to focus on several areas”, added the Secretary-General.

• We need adequate and predictable resources. Austerity is a reality. But if we are doing our part to save, Member States must do theirs to fund.

• We need to make further organizational changes. The Change Management Team is looking at a number of key areas, including information technology, procurement, business processes, and work-life balance.

• We need to make the United Nations a hub of innovation.

• We need to strengthen staff security. You have my commitment on this. Here, too, Member States will have to recognize the need for resources.

• We need to ensure accountability and transparency. And we need to ensure that the Umoja project is a cornerstone of this effort.

• It is vital that professional staff and managers experience several duty stations to understand the full breadth of our organization and ensure that we can deliver our mandates effectively in the most difficult duty stations. This should always be an opportunity, never a burden. That is why we have been consulting with staff representatives on proposals for a comprehensive mobility policy to present to the General Assembly in 2012.

The Secretary-General fielded questions from staff in Nairobi, The Hague, New York, Geneva, Bangui, Beirut, Vienna, Juba, and Santiago, on three mains themes: mobility, staff security, and the 3% budget reduction proposed by the Secretary-General.

Staff security

The President of the Staff Union in New York, Ms. Barbara Tavora-Jainchill, speaking in the name of a very wide number of unions in the UN System and a variety of duty stations, raised the issue of security and the growing threat to staff, asking the Secretary-General to be more often present in person in tragic circumstances. The Staff Union also asked the SG to create a “staff-management working group on security measures to identify and correct the flaws in the system,” including the issue of housing several agencies and programmes in the same building.

The SG reiterated that staff security was a priority and indicated that he would follow up on meetings that already took place with the Deputy Secretary-General. He added that he was looking forward to improving the relationship between management and staff unions. “The fact that relations have not always been as harmonious as expected” had been a regret during his first term, he explained.

3% Cut in Budget

Answering questions from Staff Unions in Geneva and Vienna concerning the cuts in the budget and their adverse impact on staff, in terms of contracts but also security and health services, Mr. Ban pointed out that we are living “in an era of austerity”.

He added that it was possible to cut “through the fat” without “cutting through the muscles or the bones” and that offices had already been able to come up with an average of 3.7% cut in the budget. “The 3% cut is not across the board, and doesn’t apply uniformly to all offices”, he explained, adding that some departments had been able to offer a voluntary cut of 7%.

Mobility

In response to a question from Bangui and a remark from the Staff Union in New York, the SG indicated that the Secretariat had been tasked by the General Assembly to present a plan on mobility at its 67th session. He added that he would be striving to strike a “balance between continuity and expertise”. “It may be the case that if someone works for 10-15 years in one place, he may become an expert, but we need our staff to be multi-functional”, he said.

Whistleblowing Austria - new service for those who want to speak freely on corruption and wrongdoings

The requirements of the law are the following: to live honorably, to harm no one, to concede everyone his own.
Codex Iuris Civilis (529 CE)

Institutions, 1. Book, Titel I, Verse 3

Only disclosed wrongdoings can be fought.

Julian Assange

The goal of Whistleblower Austria is to contribute to an open society, in which it must be possible to speak freely of corruption and other wrongdoings both within the state and the private sector, as well as to help those who disclose these wrongdoings and misconducts and who take action against them. First of all, this website should contributes to disseminate the idea of whistleblowing in Austria.

Whistleblowing is not meant to denigrate or denunciate colleagues at work, but to make available

information of common or public interest, which serve the cause of stopping wrongdoings and

misconducts. Whistleblowing is an act of social courage !

“In Austria, there is a certain culture of corruption”, so the former president of the Court of Audit,

Mr. Franz Fiedler, in summer 2010 when the embarrassing classification of Austria as 16th of the

corruption list of Transparency International was published.

The goal of Whistleblowing Austria is therefore also to contribute to a counter-culture to the culture of

corruption.

Corruption itself is by far not the only problem people encounter in corporations and authorities: attacks

and threats to life or physical condition as well as the physical and mental health are unfortunately

common. Mobbing, humiliation, bullying and sexual harassment and violation also are every-day threats

in corporations. Another form of misconduct is dismissal, relocation and discharge due to whistleblowing.

It is about time to release a Whistleblower regulation not only for the Republic of Austria, its

Länder and municipalities, but also for other institutions like political parties, churches, religious societies, other NGOs.

The rule for almost every misconduct is that the most effective determent is the fear that it will come to

light and someone will deal with it.

This at least is the opinion of the Court of the United Nations Dispute Tribunal. The United Nations who

employ more than 60.000 people around the globe – many of them in Vienna – see themselves as

exemplary employer. To what extent pretense and reality drift apart is another story. The fact that the UN

released a Whistleblowing regulation already in 2005 should however give Austria as an active member

of this organisation an impetus to better protect whistleblowers.

Julian Assange and his team have dramatically pushed whistleblowing with their internet platform

WikiLeaks into public awareness.

In all cases Whistleblowing is about pushing back the legal hurdles which protect people from answering

for their – in any case unlawful, sometimes criminal misconduct. Such a legal hurdle which got under

pressure in the last few years is the banking secrecy. Abuse of other legally protected secrets as the

official, professional, trade and company secret have to be verified regarding their usefulness.

Persons who disclose such grievances should not be persecuted, but protected. Whistleblowers,

however often get persecuted, mobbed or devilled; they are in fact the heroes of our time, when the

abuse of power, corruption, defamation, sexual harassment, lies and other unethical behavior may hold

sway.

Last but not least it is urgently necessary to legitimize Whistleblowing in Austria as in other

countries both within State agencies and within private companies and corporations while respecting data protection provisions.

A Bloated U.N. Bureaucracy Causes Bewilderment

click here for story

By MATTHEW SALTMARSH

Published: January 5, 2011

GENEVA — When Bolivia wanted a list of standards drawn up for the trade in llama and alpaca meat, it turned to an unlikely source: the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe.

This little-known body, based in Geneva, published a 44-page report in 2008 offering global norms for the fat thickness and trimming of llama cuts, and the means of avoiding “ragged edges” and ensuring that “cross-sectional surfaces” form approximate right angles with the skin surface.

It also offered a color gauge for in-shell walnuts and walnut kernels, and recently a glossy 75-page brochure on red and green peppers, highlighting product characteristics for food traders to avoid, like mold or discoloration.

The United Nations is widely known for functions like peacekeeping, health programs, refugee support and the International Court of Justice. But those are just a part of its bureaucracy, whose size and structure still bewilder many of its own employees.

There are five big centers — New York, Geneva, Rome, Vienna and Nairobi — and numerous smaller ones. In Geneva alone, the United Nations held 10,000 meetings in 2009, offered 632 training workshops and translated 220,000 pages of documents for its yearbooks, reports, and working papers.

But in these difficult economic times, as many countries reduce their own services, critics are asking whether there is a case for putting this army of civil servants to work in a smarter, more streamlined manner.

“There’s huge redundancy and lack of efficiency,” said Mark Malloch Brown, deputy in 2006 to the secretary general at the time, Kofi Annan, “but it’s entirely the making of the member states, who want to pass certain resolutions and demand certain papers.”

There appears little prospect of genuine overhaul soon, given its size, the competing interests of its 192 member states, and the fact that the worst of the financial crisis may be over.

The frustration is often most pointed among those with exposure to the private sector, like Jean-Pierre Lehmann, professor of international political economy at the I.M.D. business school in Lausanne, Switzerland.

“Generally, the U.N. has been a terrible disappointment compared to the ideals with which it was established” after World War II, he said. “It serves as a gravy train for a very bloated employment system, and, yes, there is huge overlap between the agencies.”

In food standards, for example, the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe is far from alone, often examining the same issues as other U.N. bodies like the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization. Its mandate also overlaps with national or regional agencies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Food Safety Authority.

The United Nations itself is broadly divided into six parts, the best known of which are the secretariat, headed by the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon; the General Assembly; the Security Council; and the International Court of Justice. The other two are the Economic and Social Council and a Trusteeship Council.

Latest U.N. figures show it employs about 75,000 people, including those in related agencies, under a $5 billion annual budget. This excludes its 16 peacekeeping operations and the cost of several agencies financed by voluntary contributions from member states. Mr. Malloch Brown, chairman of global affairs at F.T.I. Consulting in London, estimates the real annual budget is about $20 billion when all funds and programs are included. That budget is “utterly opaque, untransparent and completely in the shadow” and would benefit from being consolidated and audited from the outside, he said.

The secretariat and related agencies comprise 16 specialized bodies, including theInternational Monetary Fund; four related organizations, including the World Trade Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency; two trust funds; and three convention secretariats, including the one on climate change.

Under the General Assembly, there are eight committees and a plethora of boards, councils, working groups and panels. There are also 11 “programs,” including Unicefand the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

Below the Security Council sit a dozen “subsidiary bodies,” including peacekeeping operations.

The Economic and Social Council has five regional commissions, including the Economic Commission for Europe; nine functional commissions; three standing committees; and expert, ad-hoc and related bodies.

“We need to reform the institutions rather than abolish them, en principe,” Mr. Lehmann said, “but it is a Herculean task and so far, I think, all attempts have failed.”

During the late 1990s, Mr. Annan initiated what he called a “quiet revolution” by reducing staff, cutting the administrative budget and trying to weed out patronage. Staff numbers are down.

Mr. Malloch Brown said Mr. Annan was “fairly” successful, mainly because he had previously held a number of top positions inside the United Nations and had “understood the levers.” But political constraints make change almost impossible at the central secretariat, he said.

Jan Kubis of Slovakia, executive secretary of the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe, defended his organization’s role during an interview at his office overlooking the lake in Geneva.

“We do our standard setting, we do our norm setting, we do our reports and it is so technical and so diverse and so apolitical that we are below the line of visibility,” said Mr. Kubis, a respected veteran of European diplomacy and bureaucracy. “Very often you hear about this or that development, but rarely are we mentioned.”

The commission has 220 employees, and its 2010 budget, most of which went on staff, was almost $50 million. Mr. Kubis said the squeeze is on. “We are asked to do more but the resources are basically the same,” he said.

For some, certain issues have become even more acute under the current leadership. Inga-Britt Ahlenius, the former under secretary general for the United Nations internal oversight office, submitted a damning end-of assignment report in July to the secretary general, which was subsequently leaked.

It described a pervasive culture of secrecy, notably surrounding Mr. Ban. She said that he appeared more concerned with preventing news leaks than with releasing possible criminal evidence to prosecutors. She also said Mr. Ban’s office had blocked attempts to improve transparency despite commitments to the contrary.

At the time, the U.N. said that it regretted the leak but that the memo’s “frank thinking and advice” would be reviewed as an important tool for improving management. Farhan Haq, a spokesman for the United Nations in New York, declined to comment on the accusations, saying the issues were “raised long ago and were responded to in detail then.”

More broadly, he said that Mr. Ban “feels he has made progress in internal reforms,” notably revamping the internal justice system to handle disputes more transparently; by encouraging senior officials to comply with financial disclosure rules; by strengthening whistle-blower protection; and by expanding the role of the U.N. Ethics Office.

Back in Geneva, Mr. Kubis argues that reform can occur only “step by step.”

“You are surprised what is coming from New York sometimes,” he said. “It’s simply sometimes impossible.”

The work of the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe is “a never ending story,” he said. A current priority is developing standards to allow people with impaired vision to detect electric cars. “We’re working on it,” he said. “We are unique.”