April 10, 2017

The U.S. Should Enforce the Law to Improve U.N. Whistle-blower Protections, Heritage Foundation

Brett D. Schaefer

http://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2017-04/BG3199_0.pdf

Summary: The United Nations and its employees enjoy broad immunities that insulate them from external accountability under national laws unless those immunities are waived. This places an extremely heavy responsibility on the U.N. to self-scrutinize, self-police, correct, and punish wrongdoing by the organization and its employees. However, U.N. oversight and accountability have been weak historically. As a result, whistle-blowers are particularly vital to U.N. accountability. By reporting mismanagement, abuse, or criminality, whistle-blowers alert the organization and its member states to problems that might not otherwise come to light. The U.N. adopted whistle-blower protections and established the Ethics Office over a decade ago. However, whistle-blowers in the U.N. continue to face retaliation. To encourage international organizations to address this problem, Congress passed a law withholding 15 percent of U.S. contributions unless the Secretary of State reported that they had adopted best practices on whistle-blower protection. If the U.S. wishes to protect whistle-blowers in international organizations, then it should withhold funding from organizations with inadequate protections and communicate clearly to them the improvements they must make to avoid withholding in the future.