New Whistleblower Policy Could Give Move to Defund the UN a Boost

"Six months after a United Nations watchdog report suggested better protection for UN whistleblowers, the global bureaucracy is about to produce a policy that could make a bad situation for those employees a lot worse.

It could also produce an early headache for new UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who took office on January 3, as he faces U.S. legislators who are eager to cut UN funding as a result of the Security Council's Dec. 23 resolution condemning as illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem...

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon ... faced a variety of grave, whistleblower-ignited scandals during his decade-long tenure... They ranged from allegations of secret UN transfers of forbidden foreign currency to the nuclear-ambitious regime of North Korea to the welter of sexual abuse scandals involving non-UN peacekeepers in the Central African Republic, where the UN was accused of inaction and deliberate coverup by an independent panel of jurists and legal experts...

Guterres ... faces the prospect of ... irate U.S. legislators, whose actions will gain ever greater weight after the inauguration of Donald Trump, himself no fan of the U.N.'s anti-Israel actions.

One weapon at their disposal could be a U.S. statute passed in 2015 that mandates Washington to withhold 15 percent of its UN contributions if the Secretary of State does not certify the organization is implementing and enforcing 'best practices' to protect whistleblowers from retaliation for 'internal and lawful' public disclosures..."