By Matthew Russell Lee, Exclusive Patreon
Germany - Honduras - UN Q - Tel Aviv Austria
UN GATE, July 12 – After Inner City Press published leaked audio, here, of UN Office of Internal Oversight investigator Ben Swanson recounting being ordered by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres NOT to investigate sexual harassment committed by a UN Assistant SG, now in July 2021 Guterres has promoted Swanson to the head of OIOS.
This for twice protecting Guterres' crony Fabrizio Hochschild - amid the scandal of ASG's hands up trousers of a female D-1.
It is outrageous, but par for the course in Guterres' UN, from which Inner City Press is still banned after 1206 days.
And Guterres' personal spies OIOS under Swanson, like his UN Security thugs including Ronald E. Dobbins told to target, rough up and ban Inner City Press, now assert the right to seize and search personal cell phones in the UN, in a message leaked to Inner City Press:
"Thu 7/23/2020 9:23 AM - We wish to bring to your attention an alarming precedent established in a recent (still unpublished) decision issued by a United Nations Dispute Tribunal (UNDT) judge, which jeopardises our right to privacy going forward. In her decision, the judge endorses the DMSPC/Administrative Law Division’s argument whereby Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) investigators are entitled to seize any personal IT device (cell phone, laptop or desktop) that has been used by a staff member in conjunction with their UN work (for instance, by using a UN-issued SIM card on your private phone, or by installing UN licensed software i.e. MS Outlook on your personal phone/laptop). The legal question relates to the interpretation of ST/AI/2017/1 (Unsatisfactory conduct, investigations and the disciplinary process) in conjunction with ST/SGB/2004/15 (Use of information and communication technology resources and data). Based on the argument of the Administration Law Division, who supported the OIOS’s practice of seizing of personal devices, the UNDT judge questionably ruled that ST/AI/2017/1 overrides ST/SGB/2004/15. It is unfortunate that the judge failed to observe that neither ST/AI/2017/1 nor ST/SGB/2004/15 stipulate in any way or form the seizure of personal devices. The Staff Union disagrees with this interpretation of the rules, in view of the definition of “ICT resources” (Sect. 1.b) in the higher-ranking ST/SGB/2004/15, which should take precedence and limit the provisions of Sect. 6.2 of ST/AI/2017/1 to those devices issued by the UN that are “under the staff member’s control”. We believe this manner of proceeding constitutes a grave violation of a staff member’s right to privacy and to their private property. Needless to say, that seizing of a staff member’s personal phone and laptop for a minimum of two weeks would cause extreme inconvenience to any colleague who is involved in an investigation, sometimes for no wrongdoing of their own. In sum, we are calling on the OIOS to suspend these practices, especially under the current working arrangements imposed on staff due to COVID-19, when many of us are required to use our personal devices, due to the fact that the Organization was not always able to provide UN-issued devices to ensure business continuity.... We advise all staff on this issue and encourage you to reconsider your use of personal devices for UN-related work, as well as the utilization of any UN-licensed software on your personal devices."
In the leaked audio, OIOS' Swanson says.
"this whole thing of retaliation has got the potential to cause us massive, massive problems if we get it wrong.” As he describes the system, he says the U.N. used to open an investigation in response to a complaint, “and it was taking a long time because some of them are horribly complicated and some of them are just so trivial that they’re just not worth investigating entirely.” He says the office trialed a process of getting the complaint from the U.N. ethics office, at which point it would write to the person accused of retaliating against a whistleblower or someone who reported misconduct, and ask them to “tell us why you’re not guilty.” ”We’d get the stuff … in from the ethics office, we then write to the subject and, I’m paraphrasing here, saying, ‘Look, the ethics office have said that prima facie that you have retaliated therefore you are guilty of retaliation against Staff Member A, here’s all the material, here’s the ST/AI, write back to us in 10 days and tell us why you haven’t … why you’re not guilty of retaliation,'” he says, to chuckles from others in attendance. Continuing, he says: “We’ve managed to cut the time down from 247 days down to about 45 because they write back straight away and invariably it’s ‘I don’t know anything about a protected act and this is nonsense, all I did was send out an email telling people to behave themselves.'” “Then we sort of make the judgment of whether, is it worth getting 64gb of emails to prove that they haven’t only sent the email out, or do we take their word, their sworn word, for it and then say ‘well, ethics office, there is never ever going to be any sanction imposed for this retaliatory act, or whatever it’s called, and we’re not going to do anything else’?” He says they are effectively doing the ethics office's job and the office had “swallowed it up and accepted it. We’ve done two now, and I think we’ve got another two in the pipeline, and it’s working quite nicely, that brings the figures down [and] that gets the Americans off the U.N.’s back, [it] means they don’t reduce their contribution.”
Inner City Press will continue to demand re-accreditation.
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