⚠️ Trigger Warning: This post contains references to mental illness, psychiatric treatment, and the public disclosure of confidential medical records.
In what can only be described as a fundamental breach of the principles of due process, medical confidentiality, and dignity in adjudication, the United Nations Dispute and Appeals Tribunals (UNDT and UNAT) have entered dangerous territory: staff members who bring forward claims of moral harm are now being required to submit detailed medical evidence to support their case including psychiatric evaluations, therapy notes, and, in several instances, we have seen the records of the exact names of anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medications that staff members are taking. These records are not sealed and are quoted verbatim in publicly available judgments, often alongside the full names of the staff members concerned.
According to UNDT/UNAT the question of what constitutes moral injury justifying an award of compensation and what kind of evidence is sufficient or necessary to prove such injury was settled in Kallon 2017-UNAT-742 :
“compensation may only be awarded for harm, supported by evidence. The mere fact of administrative wrongdoing will not necessarily lead to an award of compensation under Article 10(5)(b) of the UNDT Statute. The party alleging moral injury (or any harm for that matter) carries the burden to adduce sufficient evidence proving beyond a balance of probabilities the existence of factors causing harm to the victim’s personality rights or dignity, comprised of psychological, emotional, spiritual, reputational and analogous intangible or non- patrimonial incidents of personality.”
While in the past medical records were occasionally submitted to support claims of moral harm, they have now become the exclusive evidentiary standard for awarding moral damages. The Tribunals have progressively adopted an evidentiary model that mirrors civil tort litigation, requiring formal psychiatric diagnoses and compelling the claimant to demonstrate a direct causal link between their mental health condition and the contested administrative decision.
In theory, this may appear aligned with principles of fairness and proportionality. In practice, it has translated into an invasive and burdensome standard of proof that disregards the psychological vulnerability of United Nations staff members many of whom are already navigating the aftermath of harassment, retaliation, abuse of authority, or abrupt termination.
The trend is particularly visible in recent UNDT jurisprudence, which has moved aggressively toward rejecting moral harm claims absent clinical documentation. Meanwhile, the Administration often contests even the most robust medical reports, challenging diagnoses, questioning causality, and in some cases, casting doubt on the credibility of the staff member’s treating physician. All of this, it must be said, for what is often a nominal and symbolic award of moral damages.
What is particularly alarming is that these medical records, ordinarily protected under doctor–patient privilege and recognized universally as confidential are neither submitted under seal nor reviewed ex parte. Instead, they are routinely cited verbatim in public judgments, including diagnostic labels, medication regimens, therapy histories, and treatment timelines, all tied explicitly to the staff member’s full name. The implications are profound: staff members are being forced to choose between their right to seek redress and the irreversible exposure of their most intimate medical history. This practice does not reflect a restorative approach to justice; rather, it institutionalizes procedural retraumatization within the framework of the UN’s internal justice system.
In 2022, I published a compendium documenting all moral damages awarded by the UN Dispute and Appeals Tribunals between 2010 and 2022, a first-of-its-kind resource mapping how the UN’s own judicial bodies acknowledged psychological harm inflicted on staff through unlawful administrative action. That body of research revealed a consistent pattern of decisions confirming moral injury, yet without any corresponding accountability for the perpetrators.
This month, I completed the updated edition of that compendium attached below, now covering the period from 2010 through June 2025 (15 years of moral damages in the UN). The research process revealed what can only be described as a disturbing evolution of jurisprudence. In reviewing the most recent judgments, I encountered not only a sharp reduction in the number of moral damage awards, but a series of rulings whose factual and evidentiary treatment of staff mental health conditions defies both legal logic and basic human decency.
Between 2023 and 2025, the trend has become unmistakable. Moral damages, already inconsistently awarded, have now been all but eliminated. In 2024, not a single judgment awarded compensation for moral damages, including in cases where staff succeeded on the merits. On paper, this decline might suggest an improvement in workplace conditions or a reduction in harmful decisions. It is nothing of the sort. The data reflects not progress but regression due to a judicial environment increasingly hostile to acknowledging trauma, and increasingly unwilling to grant redress for it.
Judicial Retrenchment and the Contestation of Psychological Harm
This marked decline cannot be attributed to an absence of harm, but rather to two interrelated developments within the internal justice system that have significantly narrowed the path to compensation for moral damages.
1. Invasive Evidentiary Requirements (Reinforced)
Beyond this shift in evidentiary standards, what is increasingly evident is the practical chilling effect it has imposed on staff. Faced with the prospect of submitting deeply personal psychiatric records, often including diagnostic notes, medication regimens, and therapy histories, many staff members are opting not to seek moral damages at all. This is particularly true for survivors of sexual harassment, whistleblowers, and those wrongfully terminated or unlawfully reassigned and retaliated against, for whom exposure of mental health records carries not only reputational risk but personal retraumatization.
Crucially, these records are not protected through sealed submissions or ex parte review. Instead, they are admitted into evidence and then cited verbatim in publicly accessible judgments. The disclosure of such sensitive information, without redaction and often alongside the staff member’s full name, violates the most basic norms of privacy and procedural dignity. The result is that those most in need of protection are left without remedy, silenced not by legal weakness but by an evidentiary process that demands they trade justice for exposure.
2. Systemic Refusal to Anonymize Judgments
Closely linked to the evidentiary burden is the UN Tribunals’ continued refusal to anonymize judgments even where the content concerns severe psychological harm, family trauma, or sensitive medical conditions. The identity of the staff member is routinely disclosed, regardless of whether they prevailed in their appeal or were vindicated after years of reputational damage.
While the General Assembly has endorsed the principle of transparency in the publication of judgments, this mandate was never intended to come at the cost of retraumatizing victims. In practice, the current approach disproportionately affects staff members, particularly those who win their cases, while shielding the individuals or systems responsible for the harm.
It is difficult to argue that publishing the names of victims serves any institutional purpose. On the contrary, it has become a deterrent. Staff who might otherwise challenge unlawful conduct are dissuaded from doing so for fear of public exposure, stigmatization, or digital permanence. At a minimum, those who prevail in their appeals should not be penalized by having their identities permanently associated with intimate psychiatric disclosures. Justice must protect, not expose.
The practice of anonymizing sensitive judicial decisions is not novel; it is well-established in other international tribunals such as the ILOAT and the European Court of Human Rights, particularly where reputational and psychological harm are at issue. The UN Tribunals must now align with these standards not only as a matter of consistency, but as a matter of basic decency.
A close review of recent jurisprudence reveals an increasingly adversarial posture by the Administration, namely, the Secretary-General’s legal apparatus, toward the recognition and compensation of moral harm, even in cases involving clear vulnerability, trauma, and institutional failure.
One particularly distressing example is UNDT/2024/003 Guezel appealed to UNAT 2025-UNAT-1531 a case involving a deceased UN staff member who died in service, leaving behind a semi-literate widow and an 11-year-old daughter in a remote village in Laos. The family, entirely dependent on the staff member, had minimal contact with the Organization and no functional knowledge of UN procedures or official languages. It took over two and a half years for the Administration to process their ABCC compensation claim. During this period, the widow received no meaningful communication, only vague assurances that the matter was under review.
The family brought a claim for compensation for the undue delay and sought moral damages for the psychological harm they endured. The child, who was the first to find her father’s lifeless body, was deemed too traumatized to testify. Nevertheless, the Tribunal found the facts sufficiently grave to award compensation. In response, the Administration appealed, arguing that the family’s moral harm was “not corroborated by reliable independent evidence” because no psychiatric reports were submitted.
In a rare and important intervention, the UNAT in Judgment 2025-UNAT-1531 rejected the Administration’s challenge. It affirmed the UNDT’s reliance on a handwritten letter submitted by the widow, which provided a restrained yet deeply affecting account of the family’s suffering. The Appeals Tribunal noted:
“Despite the personal sufferings it described, the letter was polite, objective and restrained in its tone… Its unchallenged content amply justified the award of moral damages, and we will not interfere with this award or its amount.”
Significantly, the UNAT went further, acknowledging that “the failure to seek medical attention for mental health was caused by cultural beliefs,” and explicitly recognized that factors such as limited education, environment, and social norms must inform the Tribunal’s assessment of evidence. It reaffirmed that moral harm may be corroborated through alternative forms of proof, not solely medical documentation.
These are the kinds of judgments the system urgently needs more of: balanced, context-sensitive, and grounded in a humane understanding of evidence. Yet regrettably, they remain the exception when they should be the norm. This approach to moral harm should not be a rare judicial act of empathy, it should be the default standard across all moral damages claims
In another case, UNDT/2025/021, a survivor of the 2020 Beirut Port explosion, whose PTSD diagnosis was not disputed in principle was subjected to intense evidentiary scrutiny by the UN’s legal team, which contested the extent of her trauma and succeeded in having her entire psychiatric history including medication details published in the judgment. The most intimate aspects of her mental health are now permanently accessible in the public domain.
These are not isolated cases. I am personally aware of a former UNHCR staff member who withdrew her complaint of sexual harassment when the UNDT refused to grant her anonymity, despite the sensitivity of the allegations. The cost of pursuing redress was simply too high.
In case after case, moral harm is treated as irrelevant, excluded from consideration regardless of the circumstances. The process discourages the vulnerable, retraumatizes survivors, and treats mental suffering as collateral to litigation. It is a system where the burden of proof has become a weapon, and justice, a deterrent.
Restoring the Duty of Care: Jurisprudential and Procedural Reforms
If the UN Tribunals are unwilling to revise their evidentiary threshold in the immediate term, they must, at a minimum, adopt protective procedural measures during a transition period.
One urgent reform is to allow medical records supporting claims of moral harm to be submitted ex parte. These documents, often containing the most intimate details of a staff member’s psychological state, should never be cited in open judgments, let alone quoted verbatim. These documents are not policy arguments. They are human evidence of institutional failure and must be treated with the corresponding degree of care and discretion.
Moreover, the Tribunals must recognize that psychological harm does not always manifest within the narrow timeframe of litigation. Many staff members develop PTSD, depression, or anxiety after the conclusion of proceedings, even after winning their cases. The notion that unlawful termination, reassignment, retaliation, or sexual harassment can occur without psychological consequence is not only clinically unsound: it is legally absurd.
If a staff member has succeeded in proving such violations, the presumption of resulting harm should follow naturally. Requiring further proof of what is self-evident reflects a detachment from lived reality and an insensitivity to the nature of trauma itself.
How can a staff member succeed in proving that they were unlawfully terminated, harassed, reassigned without justification, or subjected to retaliatory investigations only to be told that this is not, in itself, evidence of harm? The Tribunal’s approach effectively severs the link between the violation and its natural psychological consequences, as if institutional abuse can exist without emotional fallout.
Who among us could be summarily dismissed, publicly discredited, blacklisted from future employment, and dragged through years of litigation and emerge psychologically unscathed? The causal relationship between systemic injustice and mental distress is both medically recognized and self-evident.
Yet the Tribunal demands granular proof of that suffering:, diagnosis by diagnosis, pill by pill, as though trauma must be itemized to be believed.
It is time for the UN Tribunals to fundamentally change their approach. In cases involving unlawful termination, harassment (including sexual harassment), retaliation or abuse, where the staff member prevails, moral damages should be awarded automatically. The burden must not fall on the staff member to further justify that which the facts of the case already imply.
The Way Forward: Immediate Procedural Reforms
The Tribunal system must urgently align itself with international best practices, such as those adopted by the ILOAT and adopt procedural safeguards that center the dignity of staff. The following reforms are both feasible and overdue:
- Anonymize all UNDT and UNAT judgments by default, particularly those involving medical harm, sexual harassment, or whistleblower retaliation. There is no defensible legal rationale for exposing the identity of a staff member who has already suffered harm. Transparency must not come at the expense of protection.
- Permit the submission of medical records ex parte and shield such documents from publication. These records are not legal arguments; they are deeply personal evidence of suffering. Requiring staff to disclose them publicly compounds harm and deters rightful claims.
- Acknowledge the delayed onset of moral harm. The current requirement that staff demonstrate contemporaneous trauma fails to account for the well-documented reality that mental health deterioration often occurs after the legal battle has ended. Any credible adjudicative system must reflect this understanding in its reasoning.
What is particularly troubling and fundamentally contradictory is how the jurisprudence of international administrative law has, for decades, clearly articulated the Organization’s duty of care toward its staff. From UNAdT Judgments No. 872, Hjelmqvist (1998) and No. 1273, Aidenbaum (2006), to ILOAT Judgment No. 402, In re Grasshoff (1980) and ADB Decision No. 5, Bares (1995), the principle has been consistent: employers especially international organizations bear a legal and moral obligation to safeguard the dignity, well-being, and mental health of their personnel.
Yet, despite this established body of jurisprudence, the UN Tribunals today systematically fail to apply the same logic when it comes to moral damages. Nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in the Tribunal’s refusal to presume harm in cases of serious rights violations, and its insistence on invasive evidentiary thresholds that effectively negate the very concept of duty of care.
In Judgments No. 1125, Mwangi (2003) and No. 1204, Durand (2005), the former UN Administrative Tribunal held that staff regulation 1.2(c) codifies a duty of protection with the force of a general principle of law. In Mwangi, the Tribunal was unequivocal:
“Even where such obligations are not expressly spelled out in the Regulations and Rules, general principles of law would impose such an obligation, as would normally be expected of every employer. The United Nations, as an exemplary employer, should be held to higher standards and the Respondent is therefore expected to treat staff members with the respect they deserve, including respect for their well-being.”
And yet, that respect is nowhere to be found in the current treatment of staff seeking redress for psychological harm. The UN speaks of duty of care in policy papers, mental health strategies, and inter-agency frameworks but in the courtroom, it retreats to technicalities, burdens of proof, and bureaucratic cruelty.
Until the UN Tribunals implement the most basic reforms from protecting medical confidentiality to restoring the presumption of harm and anonymizing victims by default, UN staff seeking justice will continue to face a brutal choice: suffer in silence, or disclose their most intimate psychiatric records to the system that failed them.
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