Note
"Two whistle-blowers exposed evidence-tampering by a top official within the U.N. office that is supposed to investigate corruption in the world body's operations and suffered retaliation for it, a U.N. judge has ruled.
The ruling and other recent opinions by the U.N. Dispute Tribunal show the world body still struggles to hold itself accountable...
Despite U.N. efforts to keep their case from public view, the two whistle-blowing investigators from OIOS [Office of Internal Oversight Service] won a public hearing in October...
[T]he United Nations in 2006 established a special anti-corruption unit, the Procurement Task Force, that uncovered at least 20 major schemes affecting more than $1 billion in U.N. contracts and international aid. But at the beginning of 2009, the U.N. closed the agency and diverted its work to the OIOS Investigations Division.
In a ruling last month, Judge Goolam Meeran said the Investigation Division's deputy director, Michael Dudley, 'admitted to altering and withholding evidence' in an investigation and had retaliated against the investigators assigned to the case, Florin Postica and Ai Loan Nguyen-Kropp.
The judge awarded Postica and Nguyen-Kropp $40,000 each for moral damages...and $10,000 for legal costs, but the ruling doesn't require OIOS to punish Dudley.
The case originated from a complaint Dudley took from a U.N. staff member in January 2009 that U.N. physicians were using or improperly prescribing controlled narcotics."