Picture taken by Nadine Kaddoura/Homs 2012
The staff in Geneva and New York and the legal apparatus that shields them have long treated field staff as second class. And when I speak about field staff, I don’t mean only those in the Field Service category, but all staff serving in field duty stations, particularly in conflict zones as opposed to those based at headquarters.
There is a long-term, persistent, unspoken hierarchy in the United Nations, one that consistently favors those who remain anchored at headquarters over those who serve on the frontlines. And yet, the staff who choose to go where the work is urgent and consequential are the ones most often overlooked, sidelined, or denied recognition. The core of the UN’s mandate (humanitarian response, conflict resolution, capacity-building, protection) takes place far from its polished conference rooms and ceremonial declarations.
It is precisely the staff who choose to serve in these demanding, high-stakes environments who remain the most invisible. Their contributions are undervalued, their careers stunted, their entitlements often contested or denied. Take, for example, something as basic as the education grant: the speed with which it is processed and reconciled for staff based at headquarters compared to those in the field ( or worse, those handled through regional service centers) is staggering.
I chose to go to the field on my own. What I experienced there was an eye-opener: it reshaped how I think, how I decide, and how I lead.
No headquarters posting could have offered the same clarity or urgency. Nowhere else are your judgment, decisiveness, and ability to act under pressure tested as relentlessly as in the field. You don’t have the comfort of lengthy meetings or the time to craft elaborate presentations that may impress on paper but do little on the ground.
In field operations, your effectiveness is measured by what you can deliver, immediately and often with minimal support. Ingenuity thrives in environments where resources are scarce and systems are unfinished; you don’t wait for ideal conditions; you create solutions, adapt in motion, and keep the mission moving forward. This is especially true in start-up or emergency settings, where nothing is in place and yet everything is expected of you from day one.
The stakes are high: lives, missions, and credibility hang in the balance. And amid the urgency, there is a rare sense of collective focus, where staff rally around outcomes that actually matter. Nowhere else in the UN system is it possible to build capacity, deliver impact, and scale solutions as rapidly and meaningfully as in the field.
Back in 2006, then-Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown spoke candidly about the future of the Organization. He said the next generation of UN leaders would emerge not from behind desks in New York or Geneva, but from the field: from those who had seen operations up close, made hard decisions in real time, and stood accountable for outcomes, not optics.
In 2010, the Secretariat went further and codified this vision by making service in an “E” category hardship duty station a formal requirement for eligibility to apply for D-1 and above positions. For a moment, it seemed the Organization might finally begin to recalibrate the imbalance between headquarters and the field to acknowledge the depth of professional expertise and leadership forged far from the flag-lined corridors of the Palais des Nations and First Avenue.
In reality, the gap between field and headquarters has only grown wider with time. Year after year, we continue to see appointment exercises and eligibility determinations that sideline staff who served in conflict zones or under non-Secretariat entities, in favor of those who remained stationed at headquarters.
The most recent judgment, UNDT/2025/031 is as shocking as it is revealing. It shows how UN Headquarters in New York went a step further in institutionalizing discrimination against staff who served in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, by deciding that their service would not count toward eligibility, simply because UNRWA does not apply the exact same set of rules and regulations as the UN Secretariat.
Yes, you read that right.
You could serve for years under fire and bombing in Gaza, with displaced communities in Syria, or in volatile East Jerusalem and UNHQ can simply decide that none of it counts.
Your service, your hardship, your UN badge?
All of it erased the moment you ask for what you’ve rightfully earned. Why? Because UNRWA, according to DMSPC and its legal architects in New York, does not apply the exact same set of staff rules and regulations as the Secretariat.
So yes, you were in the UN system. But no, your service doesn’t accrue. Your years don’t qualify. Your experience doesn’t translate. And then you’re strangely told by UNHQ that you belong somewhere in between: not quite inside, not quite outside. And it’s because, you see, the rules are not exactly the same. That technicality, they claim, is enough to erase your years in the OPT which, in truth, were the most challenging, meaningful, and defining part of your entire UN career.
A few weeks ago, the United Nations Dispute Tribunal issued Judgment UNDT/2025/031, confirming how this practice is being applied in concrete terms.
The case concerned a Chief of Section working with OCHA in Geneva who had spent a significant part of her career serving in the Occupied Palestinian Territories first with UNOPS, then with UNRWA, before joining the Secretariat. Her record was emblematic of everything the UN claims to value: mobility, hardship postings, functional versatility, service across agencies. At the point of review, the Administration took the position that her years of service with UNOPS and UNRWA were to be excluded entirely. They were not credited toward the required five years of continuous service, nor were they included in the calculation of eligibility points. In effect, the most substantial and high-risk phase of her UN career was treated as if it had no legal weight whatsoever.
This decision effectively disqualified over a decade of service in the UN system based on the assertion that UNOPS and UNRWA were not governed by exactly the same set of UN Staff Regulations and Rules. The legal reasoning ignored the very instrument that governs inter-agency mobility: the Inter-Organization Agreement (IOA), which clearly states that service transferred or seconded between organizations in the UN common system must be treated as if it were performed in the receiving entity. In short, the Administration applied selective readings of policy to exclude her entire trajectory, while continuing to reward those who had never once left the comfort of headquarters.
The Tribunal found the decision unlawful. It held that the refusal to recognize the applicant’s service with UNOPS and UNRWA violated the IOA, misapplied the Secretariat’s own administrative issuances, and deprived her of points to which she was clearly entitled. The Tribunal’s findings leave no ambiguity. The Administration’s refusal to credit her service was not only unsupported by the applicable legal framework , it effectively penalized her for having served in some of the UN’s most complex and high-risk duty stations. But, this isn’t new…
Under Ban Ki-moon’s leadership, the Organization launched one of its most aggressively marketed internal campaigns: mobility and gender parity. The Secretariat issued bulletin after bulletin on the need for more women in senior leadership roles and the importance of posting to hardship duty stations. It was framed as a new era : a system-wide policy shift aimed at leveling the playing field and rewarding those who took the difficult assignments. On paper, it looked like change but in reality, it became another layer of empty rhetoric used to justify selective recognition.
I went to Syria voluntarily. It was a start-up mission at the peak of the war. We were operating under bombing raids, chronic insecurity, limited access, and no infrastructure. I was one of the very few senior women in the field at the time, tasked with building systems from scratch while trying to protect staff and maintain operational continuity in a collapsing environment. It was the clearest expression of what the UN says it values: service, courage, competence, and commitment to mission.
And yet, when the permanent appointment exercise came, the officials in OHRM (now DMSPC) together with the legal advisors at UNHQ, determined that I would not be granted the permanent appointment, relying on the claim that a prior shift in my contractual status from a 100 series to a 300 series appointment rendered me ineligible, despite the fact that I met every requirement, including geographic mobility, language proficiency, sustained performance, and service in a Category E duty station..
I never placed much value on the permanent appointment. Years earlier, I had willingly given up a stable 100-series fixed-term contract to take on a far less secure 300-series appointment because the work mattered more than the contractual security. But when the Administration later denied me the permanent appointment invoking baseless arguments and disregarding the very eligibility framework it had put in place, the issue became one of principle.
The Administration understood that their position would not withstand judicial scrutiny. A contested proceeding would have exposed the disconnect between policy and practice: a senior woman, deployed to Syria under daily shelling, fulfilling every requirement for eligibility, yet denied a permanent appointment at the height of a public campaign promoting gender parity and field mobility. The reputational risk was evident. The decision was quietly reversed before the matter could proceed to the Tribunal not out of acknowledgment of wrongdoing, but to avoid the consequences of having that contradiction examined in a public forum.
That was in 2010.
One would think the Organization had evolved since then that at the very least, it had learned from its administrative missteps. But it hasn’t. The very same officials who tried to block my appointment in 2010 are still sitting in UNHQ today, in the same chairs, behind the same walls, producing nothing of value while field staff carry the actual weight of this system. And now, they are attempting to deprive another woman one who served in the occupied Palestinian territory, in Gaza and Jerusalem, under UNOPS and UNRWA of the same rights they tried to withhold from me.
While they remain in place, untouched, unexamined, and shielded from accountability, it is field staff who have carried the weight of the Organization’s work.
They are the ones who have built trust across fractured communities, negotiated access under threat, coordinated humanitarian response in collapsing systems, and operated in proximity to real, daily risk.
This article does not call into question the integrity or dedication of staff serving in headquarters duty stations ( I myself have served in both New York and Geneva). The issue lies squarely with those in positions of authority: the decision-makers in operations, policy, and legal offices, who continue to uphold and reproduce practices that systematically disadvantage those who served where the UN’s presence was most needed.
Just days after the OCHA/Geneva ruling, a second judgment UNDT/2025/041 followed. The Tribunal ruled in favor of a staff member based in Nairobi and later deployed to Somalia, finding that the Administration had unlawfully excluded his years of Secretariat service during a secondment from UNICEF to UNEP when assessing his eligibility for a continuing appointment. The decision was rescinded.
What comes next is already in motion. A wave of suspension of action requests, many of which have already been registered with the Management Evaluation Unit and the UN Dispute Tribunal, will contest non-renewals and terminations triggered by the highly dubious UN80 review exercise.
And brace yourselves, because once again, the staff who will bear the brunt of these administrative purges are none other than field personnel or, as UNHQ prefers to label them, staff “serving in entities that do not apply the exact same set of Staff Rules and Regulations.”
You could serve in Gaza, Mogadishu, or Aleppo but if your contract wasn’t minted at HQ, good luck proving you exist.
Apparently, you can survive mortar fire, but not a footnote in ST/AI/2012/3.
