We are about to learn the meaning of “ethics” in the United Nations administration of Ban Ki-moon. Eight months after Secretary-General Ban took office, promising to “restore trust,” he has been presented with a simple test, via the case of a former employee of the U.N. Development Program, Artjon Shkurtaj.
So far, amid a welter of U.N. delays, denials, evasions, and broken promises, it looks like Ban is about to flunk.
UNETHICAL ACTIVITIES
Who is Artjon Shkurtaj? Thirty-six years old, Albanian born, but fluent in English, he goes by “ Tony.” He is a U.N. whistleblower caught up in the scandal over the U.N. Development Program — flagship agency of the U.N. — funneling hard cash to the regime of Kim Jong Il in North Korea. Shkurtaj worked for years for the UNDP, and from 2004-2006 served as the UNDP’s chief of operations and security in North Korea. From there, witnessing one UNDP outrage after another, he tried to do his part to restore trust, by prodding his bosses at the UNDP to behave with integrity and follow their own rules. They told him not to make trouble.
Shkurtaj finally blew the whistle outside the UNDP, one of a number of voices calling attention earlier this year to such UNDP abuses as the funneling of hard cash to the rogue regime of Kim Jong Il. He also called attention to the UNDP’s curious habit of keeping $3,500 in unreported counterfeit U.S. banknotes for years inside its office safe in Pyongyang. This March, the UNDP fired him.
Shkurtaj protested that he had been sacked in retaliation for his whistle-blowing. UNDP officials denied this, saying Shkurtaj was on a short-term contract that had simply expired.
Fortunately, or so one might have supposed, the U.N. has made provision for such situations. Annan, during his scandal-driven departing bout of reform last year, set up a U.N. Ethics Office, housed in the Secretariat and reporting to the secretary-general. Among other things, the Ethics Office was tasked to protect whistleblowers from such retaliation as being shoved from their jobs.
So, Shkurtaj took his case to the U.N. Ethics Office. There, the ethics director, Robert Benson, a Canadian, took several weeks longer than expected, but on Friday finally produced a confidential memo addressed to the head of the UNDP, Administrator Kemal Dervis, and copied to Ban and a number of others. That memo leaked almost immediately to the press. In it, Benson backed Shkurtaj. Benson mentioned “independent and corroborative information” for this finding. He saw grounds that “a prima facie case had been established” that the UNDP was punishing Shkurtaj for his whistle blowing.
But it also turns out that the UNDP, which has no ethics office of its own, is refusing to recognize the “jurisdiction” of the U.N. Secretariat’s Ethics Office. Benson discussed this in his memo, urging the UNDP’s Kemal Dervis to reverse course and abide by the advice of the Ethics Office, and allow a U.N. investigation to go forward into whether Shkurtaj was sacked — wrongly — for following U.N. ethics guidelines promulgated on Dec. 19, 2005, which state that it is the “duty” of staff members to report any breach of U.N. rules, and that any staffer who does so in good faith has “the right to be protected against retaliation.”
