Front-Runner for UN Secretary-General Job Fired Employee for Criticizing UN Response to Sri Lanka Atrocities

"Helen Clark, the U.N.'s development czar, has emerged as a front-runner in the race for U.N. secretary-general...Clark's seven-year stewardship of the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) has left a trail of embittered peers and subordinates, who accuse Clark of ruthlessly ending the careers of underlings in her quest to advance her candidacy and of undercutting the U.N.'s promotion of human rights. In the most controversial move, Clark's top managers allegedly drove one UNDP official out of her job in retaliation for participating in an investigation that sharply criticized the agency's response to mass atrocities in Sri Lanka, according to internal U.N. emails and several current and former U.N.-based officials and diplomats...

Lena Sinha, a Swedish-American dual citizen, ... was forced out of UNDP after helping craft a landmark report on the U.N.'s shortcomings in the final months of the Sri Lankan civil war, ending a 15-year career there...

The Sinha case sent a chilling message to any U.N. employee who might be tempted to speak about the world body's human rights failings...

Human rights advocates inside and outside of the U.N. have also voiced frustration that the lessons of Sri Lanka have yet to be learned at UNDP. In Myanmar, for example, the UNDP-led mission has come under criticism for inadvertently abetting a system of government-sponsored discrimination against the country's minority Muslim Rohingya population, and failing to speak forthrightly enough about abuses against the group...

'The U.N. Secretary General's 'Human Rights Up Front' doctrine was aimed at helping the U.N. system and others learn from the mistakes of Sri Lanka (among others) and avoid allowing this subservient attitude toward the state become an excuse for aiding and abetting abuses,' stated a confidential October 2015 independent report, commissioned by the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights... 'It is difficult to see that learning in this respect is happening effectively... The situation bears a striking resemblance to the humanitarian community's systemic failure in the final stages of the war in Sri Lanka.'"