COMMENT: The United Nations is Broken: How to fix it?

It was a little more than a year from when I first joined the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) before one day while at the UNDP office in Bratislava, Slovakia, I was shrieked at in a very loud voice. 

“If you still want a career at the UNDP you must stop what you’re doing right now. You must stop immediately reporting corruption concerns in Russia and never mention it again!” 

This was the shrill warning that I received from a senior colleague at UNDP with whom I used to work, Ms. Adriana Dinu from Romania, when I first began to raise concerns about financial irregularities in the United Nations Development Programme in its office in Russia. 

I had joined the UNDP back in 2009, full of optimism and enthusiasm and energy. My job was to help raise funds for and deliver projects to promote renewable energy, energy efficiency and sustainable transport and combat climate change in Eastern Europe and Russia. We would identify good ideas and work with our country offices and governments to raise the funding from two large international environmental funds , the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) and the Green Climate Fund (GCF). During my time at UNDP, I played a leading role in raising over $160 million USD in new climate change projects in developing countries mostly in the eastern Europe and Commonwealth of Independent States region. 

Once approved, we would then keep tabs on the various projects to try to make sure they delivered the expected results.  Only, I discovered that many of the projects were wasting money and that results were often hard to find. There was a lack of transparency over how UN funds were spent.

Around the end of 2011 after I had been with UNDP for a little over a year, reports from UNDP’s country office in Moscow started to really worry me. One particular project seemed to be delivering nothing tangible. I found the reports indecipherable—pure gobbledydook—and could find no evidence the money was doing anything on the ground. I wondered if the funds were being employed for the purposes intended? Could someone inside or outside the UN be diverting the cash elsewhere? I started asking questions and raised the issue with my superiors. I recommended we investigate and withhold further funding until the issue was resolved.     

I wasn’t the only one concerned. Other UN staffers and consultants privately shared my fears that taxpayer funds were being misused. These concerns were later supported by an investigation that found “strong indications of deliberate misappropriation.”   

The amounts of money involved weren’t trivial. This project had a budget of $7.8 million (US). Some donor governments began to express misgivings, too.   

With this type of evidence, you’d expect UNDP to take urgent action to vigorously root out any offence, right?   

Wrong. Two internal UNDP investigations somehow managed to conclude that there was no corruption on UNDP climate change projects in Russia. An internal investigation report concluded that it found “irregularities” and “conflicts of interest” but that there was no corruption. 

That would have been that if it were not for an article called “Greed and Graft” which appeared in Foreign Policy magazine in August 2019 which highlighted the corruption problems at UNDP and the culture of fear and showed what happened to those persons who tried to speak out. Multiple whistleblowers, including myself, who tried to report corruption problems on the project were targeted, harassed, and in some cases lost their jobs. 

Following on from the Foreign Policy Article, 12 donors demanded an independent review from UNDP which when it was finished, had the exact opposite conclusion from UNDP’s own earlier investigations. This investigation called the Russia independent review concluded in February 2021 that there was indeed corruption on this UNDP climate change project in Russia, that red flags were repeatedly ignored, and that UNDP investigations were incompetent and that UNDP had systemic problems to do with corruption and cover up. There was a conclusion that my whistleblower case was unsatisfactorily handled. No one was ever criminally prosecuted for wrongdoing.  The UNDP ignored the unsatisfactory handling of my whistleblower case which unfortunately resulted in the protection of persons involved in criminal activities. 

The only significant action I am aware of was directed not at those gaming the system, but at me. Out of the blue, starting in April 2019, I found myself being investigated for trumped-up and, frankly, trivial, charges. My work computer was seized and not returned for four years; they tried to pressure my girlfriend, who was extremely sick at the time, to testify in the case being concocted against me. Colleagues who had once been friendly now kept me at arms’ length. I believe they were afraid of being targeted, too.  The culture of fear meant that my UNDP colleagues all decided that they were better served by remaining silent. They knew that if they spoke up, they might face problems also. While several colleagues were sympathetic in private, all of them decided that in public it would be better to remain silent.

The treatment left me bewildered and confused. How could I be under fire for doing what I believed was in the best interests of my organization and the taxpayers around the world who, ultimately, were funding this project?   

Belatedly, I discovered I was not alone. Whistleblowers all across the UN have found out the UN’s public pledge to protect staff who raise legitimate concerns is often an empty promise. Many have been sidelined or sacked. Is this because it is easier to discredit a whistleblower than it is to deal with their concerns and, potentially, find wrongdoing within the UN? Did the powers-that-be believe it would be better to sweep the organization’s problems under the carpet rather than put their reputation—and the funding they cherish—at risk?  

A dozen UN whistleblowers were interviewed for the June 2022 BBC documentary, The Whistleblowers: Inside the UN. The BBC documentary asked the question “Does the United Nations cover up the truth?” and the answer was a resounding yes. In the documentary, I told my story of how I was ignored, harassed, and ultimately faced years of retaliatory investigations for reporting corruption allegations. 

Many other whistleblowers interviewed by the BBC had similar stories of mistreatment. Some were much worse than my own, traumatic as my own experience has felt. The experiences of the various whistleblowers interviewed in the documentary shared one common theme which is that in each case the resources of the UN were being used to go after those who reported misconduct, rather than those who committed it. Whistleblowers lost their jobs while those involved in harassing them got away with it. All of the whistleblowers interviewed by the BBC, including myself, reported concerns about being ignored, about not being taken seriously, harassment, threats, retaliation, and about attempts to discredit them.

And believe me, it feels pretty bad. The stress of being under investigation for years, based on anonymous persons submitting fabricated evidence to the Office of Audit and Investigation (OAI) twice in a row, of having my concerns trivialized or ignored, of having my reputation impugned and feeling unprotected by the organization I believe in, has harmed my career and my health. Since leaving the UN, I have suffered insomnia and elevated stress and other health issues. My sense of self-worth was badly affected. My mental and physical well being also suffered.   

When I was younger, I idolised the United Nations and the ideals it stood for. When I graduated from the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), my dream was to work for the United Nations and help to make the world a better place. I continue to believe our dreams of a better world need countries and other stakeholders working together for the common good. Put simply, we need an organization like the UN to have values that it stands by and to deliver multilateral cooperation.   

The main goal of the UN should not be to preserve its own existence and to protect the jobs of people, many of whom have no chance of securing similar employment conditions and benefits outside of the UN. The main purpose of the UN should be to protect the world from the scourge of war and to help make the world a better place. 

In its early years, the UN seemed to be delivering this. It was there when humanitarian disasters happened, bringing food and aid and relief; it helped many countries navigate the process of decolonializing in the 1950s and 1960s; it helped birth important international agreements like the Montreal Protocol that have protected the ozone layer—and saved countless lives in the process. Today, it is needed more than ever as the world wrestles with the climate crisis, the Covid epidemic, the war in Ukraine and the military conflict in Gaza, and growing regional unrest and global uncertainty.  

But the modern United Nations no longer feels fit for purpose. The UN has spectacularly failed to prevent wars from starting or to stop their continuation. And the UN internal justice system is not working properly. When well-meaning and sincere staff raise concerns, they need to feel protected, not targeted. These people should be encouraged to come forward so the organization can learn from its mistakes and improve, not scared into silence.  

The United Nations was once a moral force for good. Today, I see an organisation governed by fear, its moral compass lost. If the United Nations cannot lead by example, it cannot lead at all.  

So what can we do to fix it?  

First, the current leadership needs to start walking the talk. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has made several statements about protecting whistleblowers and not tolerating mismanagement or harassment. The UN Secretary General should not allow or accept that there are ‘unsatisfactorily’ handled whistleblower cases in the UN system but unfortunately he does allow it and the problems continue. Guterres told a UN town hall meeting of UN Staff several years ago that “He does not want to see a single UN whistleblower penalized’.

Yet it is hard to take this talk seriously from the UN Secretary General when whistleblowers continue to be fired from the organization, as I was myself in April 2022. If they do not take serious action, governments should ask him to step aside for someone willing to put integrity above positive spin, gaslighting and smokescreens.  The UN Secretary General needs to be more General and less Secretary.

My own country, New Zealand, has been a strong supporter of the UN and was a founder member of one of the 51 countries to sign the United Nations Charter on 26 June 1945. However, when it came to the situation of my losing my job over trumped up charges from anonymous persons, the New Zealand Government has argued that they do not get involved in individual whistleblower cases. This is disappointing because my individual whistleblower case has a conclusion in a public report, the UNDP Russia independent review report of 2021, that it was handled unsatisfactorily by UNDP, and with bias, incompetence, and management interference and that I was not offered due process. To accept this conclusion, as UNDP told donors it did, should not my losing my job and those who harassed and attacked me being protected.

When there is a lack of accountability and crimes go unpunished , it nearly always leads to their re-occurrence and to even more serious crimes being committed.

Secondly, and more importantly, whistleblower concerns must investigated by an external, independent body that reports back to UN member states in the General Assembly. Currently, at UNDP, such complaints are looked into by an internal unit called the Office of Audit and Investigation (OAI) that reports, ultimately, to the senior management. There is currently no process for reviewing the work of the OAI or holding it accountable when it makes mistakes. When the OAI is successfully interfered with, as happened in my case, then asking the OAI to investigate who was responsible is of course ridiculous as it is a conflict of interest and the OAI is never going to find itself guilty.

 In mid 2021, following the conclusions of the Russia independent review which concluded the OAI had been interfered with, UNDP Administrator Steiner asked the OAI to investigate who was individually responsible for the Russia corruption cover up. The instruction from UNDP Administrator was of course utterly ridiculous.

Asking an organization to investigate and judge itself never works. It’s like telling a man accused of shoplifting to examine his own case and decide whether or not he’s guilty. How can the alleged criminal also be the investigator? In the case of the UNDP internal justice system they are the also the jury, judge, and executioner. Statistics show that staff who file cases with the UN Disputes Tribunal (UNDT) or the UN Appeals Tribunal (UNAT) end up winning less than 20 percent of the time. For the great majority of cases, the judges side with the organization.

The UN is a law unto itself. It is granted a high level of immunity from national prosecutions and laws and it is a rules based organization that selectively applies its own policies and rules. Only when the UN is subjected to external evaluations with governments and ‘truly independent persons’ acting as the jury—as other organizations are subjected to the laws of the land in which they operate—will the UN regain its reputation and begin to deliver the global progress we so desperately need.  The UN internal justice system urgently needs reform and donors need to press for more changes, rather than accepting the status quo.

John O'Brien

Special Officer for United Nations Renewal

United Nations Association of New Zealand

John O’Brien

John O’Brien, a New Zealand national, is an expert on climate change and international carbon markets. He was a staff member of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), working as a Regional Technical Advisor on Climate Change Mitigation, for 12 ½ years from 2009 to 2022, based out of first Bratislava, Slovakia and later Istanbul, Turkey. He currently runs his own climate change project development company and serves as the Special Officer, UN Reform and Renewal of the United Nations Association of New Zealand.

Image credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elías