Middle East Eye published another article yesterday, largely summarising a legal opinion by Abdul Koroma, a former International Court of Justice judge, shared with ICC member states earlier this month. The core message of that opinion is straightforward and a direct threat.
It tells ICC member states: if you remove Khan, he will appeal to ILOAT, his chances of winning are considerable, and you should be prepared to pay him over a million dollars in compensation.
Koroma then concludes that the bureau should adopt the panel’s report and close the matter. If this is not a direct attempt to influence the outcome of an ongoing investigation, I do not know what is. And it is precisely the kind of pressure campaign that only one party, in this case, has the institutional weight, the network, and the resources to orchestrate, and now a former ICJ judge writing legal opinions on his behalf and international media platforms amplifying them on cue. Clearly, one party has everything. The other has nothing.
Koroma’s opinion raises serious problems, both in its legal reasoning and in its purpose. And MEE’s decision to give it a platform and amplify it to a global audience raises equally serious questions about editorial judgment. Let me take them one by one.
First, Koroma apparently believes that the prospect of compensation at the tribunal should deter ICC member states from pursuing this case. He should know better. Since when has the prospect of losing at tribunal ever deterred international organisations, and particularly the UN, from taking the worst decisions against staff?
I have personally heard an ASG fire a staff member in retaliation and say, with complete indifference:
“Let them go to the Tribunal! What can they do? The maximum they can get is two years’ salary.”
That is how these senior officials view the administration of justice: as a cost of doing business, not as a deterrent. The compensation is not paid from their own pockets. It is paid from assessed contributions of member states, who, last time I checked, have never lost sleep over a tribunal award.
Koroma now suddenly invokes that same system as a warning to those same member states. The irony would be amusing if the stakes were not so serious. And one more thing: where was Koroma when genuine whistleblowers were retaliated against, went to the tribunal, won, and were never reinstated or adequately compensated? We did not see him wave the threat flag then. We did not see him write seven-page legal opinions warning member states about the cost of wrongful termination when it was other staff members on the receiving end. The answer is simple. Koroma defends Karim Khan. Heavy weights defend heavy weights. They are not interested in the voiceless.
Second, what Koroma is arguing, stripped of its legal dressing, is this: do not pursue a case of alleged serious sexual misconduct against the prosecutor because if he appeals, you might have to pay him a million dollars.
Let that sink in.
He is suggesting, whether intentionally or not, that the financial exposure to the organisation should be weighed against the decision to pursue accountability for alleged abuse.
That is not a legal opinion.
That is a message to the bureau that the price of justice is too high. And on the numbers themselves, one million dollars is not the extraordinary figure Koroma and MEE are presenting it as. ILOAT, UNDT, and UNAT regularly order two years’ salary for wrongful termination. Take two staff members at P5 or D1 level and you are already at a million dollars. This is everyday business for these organisations. It has never stopped a single USG or ASG from terminating staff they wanted gone.
That bar is exceptionally high and rarely met. Koroma presents it here as a likely outcome rather than a solid legal assessment. It is a number designed to frighten member states that may not be experts in international administrative law. Koroma and MEE need to be more careful about playing out these exaggerated narratives to a public that is not necessarily versed in the jurisprudence they are selectively invoking. The difference is that when compensation is awarded to common staff, nobody writes a seven-page legal opinion about it.
Third: MEE’s sensational headline is misleading, and I am afraid deliberately so.
The rules of ILOAT, UNDT and UNAT are unambiguous: if a termination is found to be unlawful, the tribunal is mandated to order reinstatement. That is not a scoop and is not a threat. That is the standard rule of procedure that applies to every single international civil servant across every UN tribunal, from the P2 clerk to the G6 assistant to the D1 director and yes, the ICC prosecutor. That is not a special privilege of Karim Khan. That is the baseline.
To craft a headline like “ICC could be ordered to reinstate prosecutor if it removes him” is to present as a revelation what is in fact the standard procedural outcome for any staff member whose termination is found unlawful. His case would look very much like any other. The only difference again is that when it is a common staff member, nobody writes about it or asks MEE to run a front page story about it.
What MEE and Koroma are deliberately omitting is the other half of that rule: in the entire jurisprudence of UNDT and UNAT, with the exception of one local staff member at G6 level, not a single staff member has ever actually been reinstated despite a tribunal ordering it. And contrary to what Koroma argues, there is absolutely zero chance of the prosecutor being reinstated even if he prevails on appeal.
If a decision is made to remove Khan and he appeals, the ICC will immediately appoint a new prosecutor. The jurisprudence of all international tribunals is clear on this: organizations must be able to continue their mandate even when a staff member has been wrongfully terminated. If every termination required waiting for the conclusion of legal proceedings before filling the position, these organisations could not function. That is precisely why they always elect payment in lieu of reinstatement; they fill the position immediately after the incumbent leaves, and it is legally near impossible to strip a new incumbent of a binding contract for a legal dispute they were not party to. The same would apply here without any question.
Organisations consistently elect payment in lieu of reinstatement and that is everyday business for them. It has never stopped a single USG or ASG from removing staff they wanted gone. To frame the standard tribunal remedy of reinstatement as a sensational threat hanging over the heads of member states is exploiting the ignorance of the public in international administrative law , and exploiting the media once again to lead a public pressure campaign under the disguise of legal expertise.
Finally and this is the most important point, it is simply an affront to the dignity of the complainant and to every woman who has survived sexual harassment, abuse, exploitation and rape inside these institutions to even suggest that an alleged offender should simply walk free because the compensation bill might be high.
That is the logical conclusion of Koroma’s argument and MEE’s decision to amplify it without challenge.
Do they understand what their messaging says to every staff member inside these organisations who is weighing right now whether to speak up?
It says: his financial interests outweigh your right to justice.
It says: the price tag on his career matters more than what may have happened to you.
It Screams: Stay Silent.
Khan himself said in one of his interviews:
“If a process can be suborned, if it can be subverted, if it can be undermined, because state appointees and diplomats, for whatever reason, think they know better, then this is a template for getting rid of any elected official, now or in the future, on spurious or flimsy or fabricated or unfounded grounds.”
Fine words.
But what Khan is doing through Koroma and MEE is precisely that: attempting to suborn a process, to pressure member states, to shape the outcome of a live disciplinary proceeding through a sustained, well-resourced, highly networked public campaign.
The complainant has none of that. She has a confidentiality agreement and faces termination if she breaches it. Article 42(3) of the Rome Statute requires the prosecutor to be a person of high moral character.
Nowhere does it say that high moral character can be purchased with a legal opinion and an ultra-sophisticated media campaign.
Much has been written about the sexual misconduct investigation against Karim Khan, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Since the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press broke the story in late October 2024, the narrative has been pulled in every direction, except, tellingly, toward the woman at the center of it.
The facts as we know them are these: a junior staff member, a Malaysian lawyer who worked directly under Khan’s supervision, a position he selected her for, accused him of repeated nonconsensual sexual contact across multiple countries over the course of 11 months. The ICC’s governing body commissioned an external investigation by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS). Khan took voluntary leave in May 2025 pending its conclusion.
According to testimony and documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, the OIOS investigation identified evidence that Khan engaged in nonconsensual sexual contact. A panel of three judges then reviewed the OIOS findings and its recommendation was that they did not meet the threshold for “misconduct or breach of duty” under the ICC’s specific legal framework. Khan has since declared himself exonerated. The case, however, remains formally open.
That is the factual record. What followed in the media, particularly from Middle East Eye and Al Jazeera, is where things get troubling.
Almost immediately after the story broke, both outlets began framing the misconduct allegations not as a workplace abuse case but as a geopolitical attack: a Mossad operation, an Israeli retaliation campaign designed to neutralise the man pursuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant.
Both outlets made a calculated editorial choice: anchor the misconduct story inside the larger narrative of a coordinated campaign to destroy the man prosecuting Israel at the ICC. The logic was straightforward and the target audience was clear: supporters of the Palestinian cause who have watched the ICC face unprecedented political pressure, and who are primed to read any attack on Khan as an attack on accountability for Gaza.
Within that frame, the misconduct allegations did not need to be disproven. They only needed to be contextualized: placed adjacent to enough geopolitical threats that reasonable readers would draw their own conclusions about motive and credibility.
The result was that both outlets prominently reported the judges’ panel’s conclusions while consistently burying or minimizing what the UN investigation itself found.
They reported on the pressure Khan faced, but did not meaningfully report on the woman who accused him. They gave their audiences a story about a prosecutor under siege. They did not give their audiences a story about the vulnerable P2 staff member whose account, according to documents reviewed by multiple serious news organizations, described a sustained pattern of abuse by the most powerful person in her professional world.
That is a choice. And it is worth being precise about what kind of choice it is.
The most egregious example: Al Jazeera published an op-ed by Sareta Ashraph Khan’s own legal counsel, arguing the case should be closed. The question worth asking is this: why did Al Jazeera decide that the right moment to publish a lengthy argument for closing the case was while the investigation was still actively ongoing??
Ashraph is Khan’s defence counsel. She is bound by a confidentiality agreement she acknowledges in the piece, which means she had access to the full evidential record: access that no journalist or civil society organization had in any equivalent public forum. Al Jazeera handed that platform exclusively to the prosecutor’s lawyer. The complainant, a P2 staff member still employed by the ICC and bound by her own confidentiality obligations, had no column in Al Jazeera. She had no column anywhere, because, unlike Karim Khan, who is an elected official and apparently exempt from the same constraints, she would face termination for speaking to the media.
Middle East Eye has functioned throughout this case as the outlet of first choice for Khan’s team whenever there is favourable information to place in the public domain. MEE broke the story of the judges’ panel clearing Khan on March 21, 2026 ahead of any official communication from the ICC or the Bureau of the Assembly of States Parties. And here we are again: the Palestine investigation, the arrest warrants, the prosecutor as a man under siege. Because MEE, like Al Jazeera, has decided that his pursuit of the Gaza case is enough to rush to his defence, enough to clear him in the court of public opinion, enough to make the woman who accused him disappear from the story entirely.
And here is the question both outlets need to answer honestly: why is it so difficult to entertain the possibility that the ICC prosecutor may have indeed committed misconduct?
Why does his pursuit of the Palestine arrest warrants, which, let’s be clear, he was legally obligated to pursue on the evidence, not as an act of heroism, automatically render the allegations against him implausible? Here is also a fact the public is largely unaware of: Khan became ICC Prosecutor in 2021, yet took no meaningful action on the Palestine investigation for three years; an investigation that had already been opened by his predecessor, Fatou Bensouda. He issued the arrest warrants only in 2024.
The answer, I would argue, is that MEE and Al Jazeera do not understand how international organizations actually operate from the inside. And that ignorance has consequences.
What both outlets consistently failed to explain to their readers is how the OIOS actually operates. The OIOS is mandated to establish facts, supported by inculpatory and exculpatory evidence alike. It is not mandated to characterise those facts as misconduct or not. That characterization is explicitly the role of the higher authority: in this case, the three-judge panel, which is mandated to issue a recommendation.
So when Khan and his supporters point to the OIOS’s findings and claim none of them established misconduct, they are describing the OIOS doing exactly what it is mandated to do: establish facts, not reach legal conclusions. The legal recommendations were the panel’s job. And the panel’s recommendation was reached through a framework with no precedent, no existing rules, constructed specifically for this complaint. Khan himself acknowledged in his Zeteo interview that “things have been made up as you go along.”The judges did not say the conduct did not occur. They said the facts as established did not meet the legal threshold under that framework. That is not exoneration but instead is a legal characterisation and a highly specific, highly contested one: fifteen bureau states voted to disregard the panel’s findings entirely and pursue their own assessment of the evidence.
Once the panel’s recommendations became public, Khan broke his silence
In his interview with Mehdi Hasan on Zeteo on April 29, 2026, his first public appearance in nearly a year, he cited the OIOS’s 137 findings, claiming that not a single one contained a determination of conduct that could be characterised as inappropriate in any way. When Hasan pressed him directly, Khan denied any sexual relationship with the complainant flatly and any kind of relationship with her.
In that same interview, Khan made it very clear that in his view the evidence threshold for genocide in Palestine has not been met. After everything the world has witnessed in Gaza, documented, filmed, reported, livestreamed in real time for more than two years, the ICC prosecutor reached for careful, measured, lawyerly language. No crime is “off limits if the evidence is there.” The evidence, apparently, is never quite there. If he is capable of that level of precision and evasion about what Israel did in full view of the entire world, one should not be entirely surprised by the sophistication of what he has constructed in his own defense. A man who can look at Gaza and find the evidentiary bar too high is a man who knows exactly how to use legal language to avoid accountability, his own included.
Middle East Eye, which has spent months defending this prosecutor as a champion of Palestinian rights and framing his misconduct case as an Israeli plot, must now sit with that answer. The outlet that rushed to publish his exoneration narrative before any official communication, which built an entire editorial architecture around his role as the great defender of Gaza accountability, that same outlet’s protagonist just told the world, on camera, that he is not prepared to call what happened in Gaza genocide.
But to understand why the judges’ panel recommendation is not the end of this story and why the bureau states who rejected it were not acting arbitrarily, one needs to understand how the UN’s own legal framework actually treats sexual harassment cases.
The standard that applies in both the UN Dispute Tribunal and the UN Appeals Tribunal for serious misconduct cases, including sexual harassment, sexual exploitation, and abuse of authority, is “clear and convincing evidence,” which is slightly below the “beyond a reasonable doubt” threshold (a standard used for criminal cases and by ILOAT). That is a deliberately high bar, and for good reason: when termination is the likely outcome of a finding of serious misconduct, the process must be rigorous and the standard must protect against arbitrary or politically motivated decisions.
That said, the application of that standard is where cases of sexual harassment and exploitation diverge sharply from other categories of serious misconduct. In fraud, in financial misconduct, in administrative abuse: the evidence is generally documentary. There are records, transactions, paper trails, and audit findings. The facts either add up or they don’t. Sexual harassment and sexual exploitation are entirely different matters. They happen behind closed doors, in hotel rooms, on official missions, and in offices. They happen without witnesses, and they happen without witnesses precisely because that is how this category of abuse is committed. The perpetrator’s position of power ensures the victim’s silence and the absence of corroboration. Applying “beyond reasonable doubt” to a sexual harassment case as if it were a financial audit systematically advantages the perpetrator.
This is why the assessment of sexual harassment cases is not a scientific, black-and-white exercise. It requires judges to consider context, weigh the credibility of both the complainant and the alleged perpetrator, examine power dynamics, examine the pattern of behavior, and make a qualitative judgment about what the evidence as a whole establishes.
That is precisely what the UN’s own internal jurisprudence recognized in a landmark judgment in Hallal v. Secretary-General, UNDT/2011/046, paragraph 55, which was affirmed on appeal in UNAT 2012-UNAT-207. The Tribunal held explicitly that credible oral victim testimony alone may be fully sufficient to support a finding of serious misconduct in sexual harassment cases, without further corroboration being required. The Appeals Tribunal confirmed that giving full evidentiary weight to the complainant’s oral testimony, absent documentary corroboration, was not an error in law. Because the Tribunal understood something the three-judge panel in the Khan case appears to have chosen to ignore: that in sexual harassment cases, the absence of corroboration is not evidence of absence. It is simply the nature of the crime.
Put simply: The UN’s own courts have recognized that requiring documentary proof in sexual harassment cases is sometimes unrealistic and unjust. Victim testimony, when credible, is enough.
And that, it seems, is precisely what fifteen bureau states could not accept. Rather than a contextual, credibility-based assessment that the jurisprudence both permits and requires, the panel delivered what appears to have been a clean, clinical, binary application of the beyond reasonable doubt standard and declared the matter closed. The states that voted to disregard the panel’s findings and pursue their own assessment were not, as Khan and his counsel have suggested, substituting political judgment for legal judgment. They were insisting that the legal judgment actually engage with the full complexity of what sexual harassment cases demand.
Article 42(3) of the Rome Statute, the very legal instrument under which Khan holds his office, requires that the Prosecutor be a person of high moral character. That is the legal condition of his office, full stop. Whether entering into any form of relationship (coerced or otherwise) with a staff member you personally recruited, directly supervised, and over whom you held absolute professional and institutional authority constitutes a breach of that standard is not a question that requires a criminal court to answer. It does not require 5,000 pages of evidence or three months of judicial deliberation. It requires an honest reckoning with what exploitation of institutional power looks like and the courage to call it by its name.
There is one dimension of this case that has received almost no serious coverage, and it is perhaps the most telling of all.
The complainant is still an active ICC staff member. She is bound by confidentiality obligations. She cannot speak publicly, give interviews, correct the record, or respond to the sustained and well-resourced public campaign that has sought to cast doubt on her credibility, including through her alleged abuser’s own legal counsel writing in the pages of Al Jazeera while the investigation remained open and ongoing.
Karim Khan, by contrast, is an elected official. He is not bound by the same confidentiality constraints. He can give hour-long televised interviews. His team can place favorable information with sympathetic outlets. His lawyers can publish op-eds in major international media. His counsel can speak to specialized legal publications. His side of this story has been told, retold, and amplified across multiple platforms in multiple languages. Hers has not been told at all because, if she spoke, she would face termination.
This is the power imbalance made visible. And it is worth noting that it is the same power imbalance that sits at the heart of the original allegations: a vulnerable P2 staff member, working in the most politically exposed prosecutorial office in international criminal justice, directly supervised by one of the most powerful elected officials in the international legal system.
Those of us who have spent years inside the UN system are not surprised by any of this. We have watched this film before. We know how it ends, or rather, how it is made to end.
Take the case of Martina Brostrom and Luiz Loures, then-Deputy Executive Director of UNAIDS and Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations. Brostrom alleged that Loures sexually harassed her from 2011 onward and sexually assaulted her in a hotel lift in Bangkok in 2015 during a major UNAIDS conference. An internal investigation cleared him. Brostrom went public in 2018. Only then did Loures announce he would not seek renewal of his position, stepping down at the end of March 2018, with UNAIDS spokesman Mahesh Mahalingam carefully telling reporters that the decision had “no connection to the allegations.”
But Brostrom would not stay silent. She was brave enough to face the institution and name what had happened to her. And the institution went after her for it. The UN fabricated a case of financial and sexual misconduct against her, involving the man who would become her husband and the father of her children. She was fired in December 2019.
“This is what the UN does to women who report their sexual offenders,” she told CNN. “They just want to get me out of the organisation.”
The independent expert panel appointed to review the UNAIDS scandal found overwhelming evidence of a broken organisational culture and called for the replacement of top leadership. UNAIDS chief Michel Sidibé, faulted for attempting to quietly suppress the matter while an official probe was underway, eventually resigned. The second OIOS investigation into Loures concluded, and its findings were never shared with the victims or the public. To this day.
The parallel to the Khan case is precise. In both cases, an initial internal investigation cleared the senior official. The complainant faced institutional retaliation. The organization prioritized its own reputation over accountability. And the senior official seems able to walk away with his narrative largely intact, while the woman who spoke up had her career and credibility systematically dismantled.
Consider also what happened at UNRWA with the former Commissioner-General in 2019. The minute the misconduct report against him was leaked to the public, the reaction was instant and predictable: this was the Israeli lobby trying to bring down a man who had defended the Palestinian cause too vocally, too visibly, too effectively. And yes, the former Commissioner-General was a genuine defender of that cause. He was a good soldier for UNRWA’s mandate, and nobody should pretend otherwise. And yes, the Israeli lobby machine jumped on that report the moment it was leaked, with everything it had, determined to use it to finish him. That part is also true.
So is this: the misconduct was real.
It existed, it was documented, and it predated the Israeli campaign against him by a considerable period. The geopolitical attack came later. The misconduct came first. Those are two separate facts and the deliberate conflation of them, whether by design or by lazy analysis, served one purpose: to make the misconduct disappear inside the politics.
I know this not as an outside observer. I know it because I went through the UN machinery myself. Not for sexual harassment, but for doing what every staff member is told they are protected to do: speaking up against misconduct and abuse of authority, and then watching the full force of institutional retaliation come down in response. I challenged that machinery in a case of abuse of authority and retaliation at both the UN Dispute Tribunal and the UN Appeals Tribunal. I won both times. I know precisely how it operates because I made it answer for itself.
But I will say this plainly: I could do that because I knew the system from the inside, having spent twenty years within it. For ninety percent of staff who find themselves in the same position, the institution will destroy them long before they reach a favourable judgment. The process is the punishment. That is by design.
I know what that machinery looks like from the inside. I know its patience, its sophistication, its absolute determination to protect the institution and the powerful individuals within it at any cost. The USGs and ASGs who operate within it are not clumsy. They are not obvious. They are charming, credentialed, politically connected and ruthless. And they know exactly which levers to pull and when.
Brostrom was a skilled, dedicated, highly capable UN professional. She is also a woman. And the institution looked at those two facts and decided which one was more useful to weaponise against her. The same calculus is being applied to the complainant in the Khan case right now, in real time, by people who have persuaded themselves, or wish to persuade us, that they are defenders of justice.
Both MEE and Al Jazeera have done genuinely important work on Gaza, on the Palestine investigation, and on the immense institutional pressures bearing down on the ICC. That work matters and should not be dismissed. But what MEE and Al Jazeera and every external observer who reflexively reaches for the geopolitical explanation will never fully grasp is this: both things can be true simultaneously.
The Israeli lobby can exploit a misconduct case for its own ends and the misconduct can still be real. The two are not mutually exclusive. They never were.
MEE and Al Jazeera chose to treat this case as already settled. They chose to amplify the prosecutor’s narrative while the complainant was silenced. They chose to publish his lawyer’s defence brief as editorial opinion. That is a failure worth naming simply because justice for Palestinians and accountability for powerful men who abuse junior staff members are not mutually exclusive propositions. Choosing the geopolitical story over the accountability story is not analysis. It is a choice. And it has consequences for every person inside these organizations who is weighing, right now, whether speaking up is worth it. Any outlet that cannot hold both of those things at the same time is not covering the story. It is choosing a side.
The women inside these institutions who endure this, who weigh their careers, their contracts, their visas, their families against the decision to speak, deserve better than to be reduced to collateral damage in someone else’s political story by the outlets they read.
We know who they are. We have worked beside them. And we are not done talking about this.
The ISA has released a series of Joint Appeals Board (JAB) judgments addressing disputes arising from Secretary-General Leticia Carvalho’s January 2025 decisions. At the same time, an unlawful diplomatic note verbale has been circulated to Member States announcing the conclusion of a disciplinary proceeding against a staff member and the individual’s separation from service for alleged serious misconduct.
First, the publication of the JAB judgments does little to resolve the central concern raised in the article. A first-level review body (the JAB) that has been dismantled at the very moment staff members sought to challenge administrative decisions, and subsequently reconstituted under the authority of the very official whose actions it is supposed to review, cannot reasonably be expected to command confidence as an independent adjudicative mechanism.
Institutional justice systems in international organizations rest on a basic principle: independence from the administration whose decisions are under review. Where the administration dissolves the review body during active disputes and subsequently re-establishes it under conditions that raise legitimate concerns regarding composition, remuneration and structural dependence, the credibility of the mechanism inevitably comes into question.
The ISA Joint Appeals Board is not a judicial tribunal but a first-instance advisory body whose members are appointed within the institutional framework of the Secretariat. As such, it operates within the administrative structure whose decisions it is tasked with reviewing, a structural arrangement that inevitably raises questions about the level of independence such a mechanism can realistically provide.
Those concerns are further compounded by the remuneration framework reportedly introduced for members of the Board. Unlike judicial tribunals whose judges are appointed through formal intergovernmental processes and whose remuneration is determined by governing bodies such as the General Assembly of the United Nations Secretariat (for UNDT/UNAT), the payment structure for JAB members appears to have been established administratively and financed from within the very institution whose decisions the Board is asked to review.
In systems of administrative justice, independence does not depend solely on the good faith of the individuals involved; it depends on institutional safeguards that prevent even the appearance of administrative influence. Where the review body is appointed, organized and remunerated through mechanisms controlled by the same administration whose decisions are under challenge, the perception of institutional dependence becomes difficult to avoid.
A Justice System Without Independence
What makes this situation particularly striking is that the structural weaknesses of such peer-review mechanisms have long been acknowledged across the United Nations system itself. In its 2023 system-wide review of pre-tribunal appeal mechanisms, the Joint Inspection Unit (JIU) observed that many organizations continue to rely on peer review bodies composed largely of internal staff members rather than professional judges. As the Inspectors noted:
“most pre-tribunal appeal bodies are composed of staff members serving on a part-time basis who are not necessarily legally trained” (JIU/REP/2023/2).
The JIU report further warns that the institutional design of these mechanisms raises structural concerns regarding both independence and efficiency. As the Inspectors explain:
“the peer-review nature of many pre-tribunal bodies raises concerns about potential conflicts of interest, delays in the process and the lack of professionalization of the review function” (JIU/REP/2023/2).
These concerns are not new. The report notes that several organizations within the United Nations system have already moved away from such peer-review models precisely in order to strengthen institutional safeguards. As the Inspectors observe:
“a number of organizations have already moved away from the traditional peer-review model towards more professionalized mechanisms in order to strengthen independence, legal expertise and the credibility of the review process” (JIU/REP/2023/2).
The United Nations itself undertook such a reform in 2009, when:
“the reform of the United Nations internal justice system in 2009 replaced the previous peer-review bodies with a two-tier tribunal system composed of independent judges” (JIU/REP/2023/2).
Recognizing these structural weaknesses, the JIU Inspectors further recommended that organizations strengthen the professionalism and independence of their pre-tribunal review systems:
“..executive heads should ensure that pre-tribunal mechanisms are adequately professionalized and supported by qualified legal expertise in order to improve the quality, independence and credibility of the review process”.
It was precisely these concerns that led the United Nations Secretariat to abandon this model in 2009. The UN replaced the former Joint Appeals Boards and Joint Disciplinary Committees with a fully professionalized two-tier judicial system composed of the United Nations Dispute Tribunal and the United Nations Appeals Tribunal, staffed by independent judges and supported by a professional registry and legal infrastructure.
Seventeen years later, however, several international organizations including the International Seabed Authority continue to operate internal justice systems that rely on variations of the very peer-review structure the United Nations itself concluded could not guarantee sufficient independence or credibility.
Against that broader institutional backdrop, the events surrounding the dissolution and subsequent reconstitution of the ISA Joint Appeals Board become even more troubling. A review body whose members are appointed within the Secretariat, whose functioning depends on administrative arrangements determined by the executive leadership, and whose remuneration is set and financed by that same administration, inevitably raises questions about whether it can function as a genuinely independent safeguard for staff members seeking to challenge administrative decisions.
Weaponizing the Publication of the JAB Judgments
The circumstances surrounding the sudden publication of these Joint Appeals Board judgments raise additional concerns that cannot be ignored.
First, the timing itself is highly questionable. Publishing judgments at this specific moment inevitably creates the impression that these decisions are being used not merely as legal documents but as instruments in an ongoing institutional and political debate.
Second, the publication occurs while the legality of the dismantling and reconstitution of the Joint Appeals Board itself remains under dispute and is currently subject to appeal before the United Nations Appeals Tribunal. Releasing judgments under these circumstances risks presenting contested findings as settled conclusions while the underlying institutional legality of the body issuing them remains under judicial review.
Third, questions have already been raised regarding the financial incentives introduced for members of the Board, arrangements that did not previously exist and which have already been criticised for potentially undermining perceptions of independence and impartiality.
There is also a basic procedural issue. Neither the Staff Regulations and Rules nor the JAB Rules of Procedure appear to provide any explicit legal basis for the publication of JAB judgments. In most international organizations operating Joint Appeals Boards, such decisions are not published at all. The absence of any governing framework regulating publication, anonymity or redaction leaves these matters entirely to ad hoc discretion.
This stands in sharp contrast to the United Nations internal justice system, where the United Nations Dispute Tribunal and the United Nations Appeals Tribunal are explicitly mandated by the General Assembly to publish their judgments in order to ensure transparency, consistency of jurisprudence and institutional accountability.
The sudden decision to publish selected judgments of the ISA Joint Appeals Board, a body that the Secretary-General herself dismantled and subsequently reconstituted, therefore raises obvious questions. Rather than serving transparency, the timing and selectivity of this publication give the impression of an administration attempting to weaponize a contested internal mechanism in what increasingly resembles a deeply unequal struggle between the Secretariat and the staff members it has chosen to forcibly remove.
In this case, the order authorizing publication appears to have been issued by the Chair of the JAB alone, without deliberation by the Board as a whole.
Equally troubling is the selective transparency surrounding the ISA’s internal jurisprudence. No JAB judgments or orders appear to have been published prior to 2025, leaving observers unable to assess how the newly constituted Board may have altered the jurisprudence of the body.
Concerns have also been raised regarding serious mischaracterizations of the factual record, including the omission from the judgment’s procedural history of the suspension of action proceedings that preceded the appeal.
Finally, the handling of redactions raises further questions. In the published judgment, the names of the Respondent and of a JAB member whose disqualification had been requested were redacted, while the names of the appellants appear unredacted throughout the document. Such asymmetry inevitably raises questions about the consistency of the Board’s approach to protecting personal identities and reputational interests.
Taken together, these circumstances strongly suggest that the publication of these judgments was not intended to enhance transparency but to advance a particular administrative narrative.
The Unlawful Note Verbaleto ISA Member States
In a striking new development, the Secretary-General has circulated a diplomatic note verbale to Member States announcing that a disciplinary proceeding has been concluded and that a staff member has been separated from service for alleged serious misconduct.
The timing of this communication also raises legitimate questions. The note verbale is dated 6 March 2026, only days before the opening of the International Seabed Authority Council meeting during the ISA’s 31st session.
Issued at such a moment, the communication strongly suggests that the Secretary-General is struggling to contain the governance crisis now unfolding within the Secretariat. Rather than restoring confidence in the organisation, the decision to circulate such a communication risks further eroding accountability within the ISA by disregarding basic procedural safeguards and publicly casting suspicion on individuals who have challenged or criticised the current management of the organization.
Such a communication raises profound procedural concerns.
Disciplinary proceedings within international organizations are governed by strict principles of confidentiality designed to protect both the integrity of the process and the rights of the staff member concerned. Publicly informing Member States of disciplinary measures taken against an individual staff member is not part of the established administrative practice within the United Nations system or comparable international organizations.
The circulation of a note verbale in these circumstances risks prejudicing the reputation of the staff member concerned while the individual retains a clear right of appeal through the organization’s internal justice mechanisms and, ultimately, before the United Nations Appeals Tribunal.
In any system governed by the rule of law, disciplinary determinations remain subject to judicial review until the appeals process has been exhausted.
Communicating such information to Member States before that process has concluded raises the question of whether the purpose of the communication is administrative transparency or the premature public condemnation of an individual who retains legal recourse.
This concern is not merely theoretical.
The jurisprudence of international administrative tribunals has repeatedly addressed the consequences of public communications that damage the reputation of staff members before judicial review has taken place.
In that case, the Global Fund issued public communications announcing that a staff member had been terminated for unsatisfactory performance. The ILOA Tribunal (ILOAT) held that such conduct constituted an unlawful attack on the dignity and reputation of the individual concerned.
The Tribunal recalled the well-established principle that:
“International organisations are bound to refrain from any type of conduct that may harm the dignity or reputation of their staff members (Judgment 2861, under 91; see also Judgments 396, 1875, 2371, 2475 and 2720).
In this case, there can be no doubt that the announcement in the News Release and the statement in the 28 November 2012 letter that the complainant was terminated for unsatisfactory performance conveyed to readers that the complainant was incompetent and unfit to perform the duties of the Inspector General.
These communications were a serious affront to the complainant’s professional reputation and his dignity. The fact that the Global Fund sent an email to its staff members directing their attention to the News Release in circumstances where the complainant was not in a position to refute its contents further exacerbates the breach. It also constitutes a serious infringement of the complainant’s right to privacy. As stated in Judgment 2861, under 92, “[i]t is of the essence of a publication that reflects adversely on a person that it infringes on his or her privacy”.
The Tribunal concluded:
“The Tribunal concludes that there was no reasonable justification for stating in the News Release that the complainant was terminated let alone that he was terminated for unsatisfactory performance. In the circumstances, the Global Fund should have simply communicated the complainant’s departure in neutral terms, such as, an announcement that the complainant was leaving the Global Fund. “
The Tribunal ultimately found that the organization’s actions had caused:
“serious and irreparable harm to the complainant’s reputation and dignity and were a breach of his right to privacy.”
The Tribunal thus found:
“Based on the information provided to the Tribunal it is evident that the Global Fund’s actions in publishing the termination of the complainant’s employment and the reason for the termination and its refusal to remove the offending information from its website caused serious and irreparable harm to the complainant’s reputation and dignity and were a breach of his right to privacy.
This entitles the complainant to an award of moral damages as does the unlawful termination of his employment in the total amount of 150,000 Swiss francs.”
Further, the Tribunal ordered:
“Within seven days of the public delivery of this Judgment, the Global Fund shall remove the News Release from its website.”
This jurisprudence is directly relevant to the present situation.
By circulating a diplomatic note announcing the termination of a staff member for alleged misconduct while the individual retains the right to challenge the decision through internal justice mechanisms and judicial review, the administration risks creating precisely the type of reputational harm that international administrative tribunals have repeatedly condemned.
International organizations enjoy jurisdictional immunity from national courts on the understanding that they provide staff with effective internal justice systems that respect fundamental due process guarantees.
Among those guarantees is the obligation to refrain from conduct capable of damaging the professional reputation and dignity of staff members whose legal remedies have not yet been exhausted.
Taken together, these developments suggest that the governance crisis within the ISA Secretariat remains unresolved. Rather than restoring confidence in the Authority’s internal legal framework, recent actions appear to confirm the deeper institutional concerns raised in the original article.
The lesson from that ILOAT judgment is difficult to miss: Carvalho’s hurried attempts to silence critics and whistleblowers do not make problems disappear; they simply transform governance failures into legal findings and mounting financial liabilities.
Before examining these developments, it is worth recalling why the International Seabed Authority matters.
Why the International Seabed Authority Matters
Most people have never heard of the ISA. That, in itself, is part of the problem.
The ISA is not technically a United Nations body. It is an autonomous international organization created under Part XI of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Yet it operates within the UN ecosystem, reports within the UN system, uses the UN’s administrative justice mechanisms, and is periodically subject to external audit, although those oversight mechanisms have so far appeared strikingly reluctant to confront the deeper governance failures taking place inside the organization.
And what exactly does the ISA govern?
The seabed beyond national jurisdiction. In the language of UNCLOS, the “Area” or the deep seabed that legally belongs to all humankind. The ISA is the body entrusted with regulating the exploration and potential exploitation of those resources.
ISA decides who who receives exploration licences.
ISA drafts the mining code governing seabed extraction.
ISA controls the pace or potential pause of deep seabed mining.
And the world is deeply divided over what should happen next:
On one side are states and corporate actors pushing to accelerate exploitation, arguing that seabed minerals are essential to the global energy transition.
On the other side are states calling for a moratorium or precautionary pause, warning that deep-sea mining could irreversibly damage ecosystems that science barely understands.
At stake is far more than mining policy. This is a geopolitical struggle over resource security, environmental risk, North-South equity, and control over the last remaining global commons.
The ISA sits directly at the centre of that fracture line. Which is precisely why governance at the ISA is not some minor administrative matter. It goes to the heart of who ultimately controls access to these global resources and under what rules.
An organization entrusted with administering the “common heritage of mankind” cannot operate with a collapsing internal justice system, budgetary irregularities, and unchecked executive power that expose serious failures in the way the ISA is currently being run.
Last year I published two articles documenting the unlawful acts carried out by the ISA Secretary-General.
Before turning to the serious developments that emerged in 2026, including a damning leaked internal note addressed to the ISA auditors, it is important to briefly recall the headline decisions taken by Secretary-General Letícia Reis de Carvalho since assuming office in January 2025.
Before her election in July 2024, Carvalho presented herself as the reformer who would bring transparency to an institution she suggested had long suffered from opacity.
“For me, the mission of the ISA and the leadership of the ISA is to be a trustee, an honest broker… It should offer transparency of its own procedures… If you are a trustee of the biggest commons on Earth, you cannot be called obscure or opaque in any way. We absolutely need practices that can turn things from opaqueness to transparency.”
Those promises collapsed almost immediately after she assumed office on 1 January 2025.
The Dismantling of the Internal Justice System
Within her first forty-eight hours, several staff members, many of whom had signed valid fixed-term contracts in December 2024 and had already entered on duty received abrupt termination letters informing them that the ISA would be “unable to complete the onboarding process.” Two additional staff members saw their contracts terminated under the guise of restructuring.These staff members were removed from their posts without reason, due process, or remedy.
As the affected staff filed urgent motions before the Joint Appeals Board (JAB) seeking review of these decisions, the crisis escalated further. The Secretary-General dismantled the entire JAB structure, leaving staff without any functioning internal justice mechanism at the precise moment they needed it. In one of its orders on the Appeals, the United Nations Appeals Tribunal expressly noted in Order No. 2024-591 its:
“concern that the JAB was dismantled temporarily without prior warning given to ISA staff members and with no reasons provided by the Administration,” observing that this had “denied staff members access to justice in the interim” and concluding that “the temporary void rendered meaningless the JAB suspension of action mechanism.”
At the same time the administration dismantled the JAB, the Secretariat moved ahead with recruitment to fill the very posts it had unlawfully vacated effectively foreclosing any realistic possibility of reinstatement before the justice process had even begun.
Five weeks later the Secretary-General appointed a new chair of the reconstituted JAB: Martha Halfeld, a former judge of the United Nations Appeals Tribunal and, significantly, another Brazilian national. The appointment placed a compatriot with appellate judicial experience at the head of the very body responsible for reviewing challenges to the Secretary-General’s own administrative decisions, raising obvious concerns regarding the structural independence of the mechanism. It became increasingly clear that accountability had little place in the new order taking shape inside the Secretariat.
A Damning Note to the ISA Auditors
On 12 February 2026, I, together with more than 200 other recipients, received a detailed internal note addressed to the International Seabed Authority’s external auditors. The document was later published online by Inner City Press.
The Note, which seems to have been written by internal technical experts, is a damning, comprehensive account of what appears to be a total systemic breakdown in the ISA’s governance framework.
The document identifies alleged serious violations touching virtually every pillar of institutional management: unlawful staffing decisions, concealed litigation liabilities, irregular recruitment practices, manipulation of the Assembly-approved staffing table, breakdown of internal financial controls, and extensive misallocation of budgetary resources.
One of the most immediate concerns relates to the litigation triggered by the Secretary-General’s January 2025 dismissals. More than fifteen employment-related cases have been filed before the Joint Appeals Board and the United Nations Appeals Tribunal.
The note estimates the ISA’s potential legal exposure at approximately US$2.5 million, yet these liabilities appear not to have been disclosed in the financial statements despite the requirements of international public-sector accounting standards.
But the most disturbing revelations concern the Joint Appeals Board (JAB) itself.
Until 2025, members of the JAB served without remuneration. After dissolving the existing board, the Secretary-General reconstituted it with new members and introduced a payment scheme that had never been approved by the ISA Assembly.
Under this arrangement:
• the Chair of the JAB receives US$2,000 per case, • other JAB members receive US$500, • and the JAB Chair additionally receives a monthly stipend of US$1,000 while cases remain active.
None of these payments appear in the approved programme budget or the Finance Committee. None were formally authorised by Member States.
The obvious question for auditors is therefore simple: from which budget lines are these payments being financed?
Even more troubling is the structure of the remuneration itself. Because payments continue while cases are “in progress,” the system potentially creates an incentive to prolong litigation rather than resolve it.
The administration that triggered the disputes now finances the tribunal adjudicating them, through a payment mechanism it introduced itself.
Whistleblowers have also shared internal meeting minutes of the newly constituted JAB dated 6 February 2025, which shed further light on how this mechanism was reassembled.
During that introductory meeting, members acknowledged that this would be the first time JAB members would receive remuneration for their services at the ISA, a practice that had not previously existed.
Several members raised concerns about whether the payments had been approved by the Finance Committee and whether Member States had even been informed of the arrangement, noting that such matters would normally require transparency toward the ISA’s governing bodies. At least one member indicated that, because of national regulations governing public officials, they would need to consult their government before accepting any remuneration. The discussion itself suggests that the payment structure had been introduced without the usual institutional clarity regarding authorization or oversight.
The same meeting also confirmed that several urgent staff cases had already been forced to escalate to the United Nations Appeals Tribunal for interim relief during the transitional period, precisely because no JAB panel existed at the time to review them.
In other words, the ISA dismantled its internal justice mechanism at the exact moment staff needed it, then reconstructed it under conditions that raised immediate questions even among the newly appointed members.
The note goes on to document more than twenty deviations from the staffing table approved by Member States, including newly created senior posts, unilateral reclassification of positions, tailoring of vacancy annoucements and recruitment carried out outside established procedures.
Across the Secretariat, vacancy announcements were shortened, positions were filled through consultants performing staff functions, and individuals allegedly closely associated with the Secretary-General were rapidly appointed through processes that appear to have bypassed competitive recruitment.
Restructuring the Secretariat Or Consolidating Power?
The restructuring of the Secretariat was presented as an administrative exercise. In practice, it appears to have served a very different purpose.A recurring concern emerging from the Secretariat’s restructuring is the consolidation of power around the Secretary-General through a pattern of appointments that bypassed established recruitment procedures and favored former colleagues who worked with her at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in Nairobi during Carvalho’s tenure there between 2019 and early 2025.
Several of the individuals brought into senior roles at the ISA appear to have worked directly with Carvalho at UNEP Nairobi during that period:
The person appointed as Chef de Cabinet (D-2) on 6 March 2025 previously served as Deputy Director of the Ecosystems Division at UNEP in Nairobi, where he worked in the same division as Carvalho between August 2022 and early 2025. Notably, the previous incumbent of the position (D-1) at ISA was abruptly terminated shortly after Carvalho assumed office. She then reclassified the post to D-2 since the new incumbent was already a D-1. That former staff member currently has several appeals pending before the United Nations Appeals Tribunal.
Similarly, the Chief of Administrative Services appointed under the new structure also worked at UNEP between 2019 and 2024 as a change management consultant, during the period in which Carvalho held senior leadership roles there.
Another appointment concerns the Head of Strategic Communications and Global Engagement, hired as a consultant at a level equivalent to P-5, who previously served as Head of Biodiversity Communications at UNEP in Nairobi from 2009 to 2020.
In addition, an individual who served between November 2021 and January 2025 in communications and partnerships within UNEP’s Marine and Freshwater Branch, a unit previously headed by Carvalho, was subsequently appointed to a communications consultancy role at the ISA.
More concerning is that the former Registrar of the UN Dispute Tribunal in Nairobi which also serviced UNEP has now been appointed as a member of the newly constituted JAB.
Taken together, these appointments raise serious questions about whether the restructuring of the Secretariat has been used not simply to reorganize the institution, but to install a network of trusted former colleagues in key positions while circumventing the competitive recruitment procedures that govern international civil service appointments. The internal note addressed to the ISA auditors suggests that these cases are not isolated but part of a broader pattern of recruitment irregularities that unfolded across the Secretariat during 2025.
The Note document concludes that these practices amount to a systematic override of internal controls.
They are accompanied by allegations of payroll irregularities, improper payment of expatriate benefits to staff working remotely outside the duty station, misallocation of expenditure across budget lines, and the effective collapse of the segregation of financial control functions within the Secretariat.
At one point in 2025, a single official appears to have exercised responsibility for budget management, finance, and internal oversight simultaneously, a concentration of control that any basic public-sector audit framework would immediately flag as a governance red alert.
Budget appropriations, which are legally authorised by Member States appear to have been treated less as binding authorisations and more as flexible pools of funding to be rearranged after the fact.
When staff members of an international organization reach the point of repeatedly leaking internal documents, compiling detailed technical notes for external auditors, and attempting through every available channel to alert oversight bodies to what is happening inside their institution, it is rarely an act of opportunism.
More often, it reflects a last attempt to protect the organization itself when normal internal safeguards have failed. The level of detail contained in the note addressed to the ISA auditors strongly suggests that it was prepared by individuals with deep technical knowledge of the Authority’s internal operations who appear to be trying, in their own way, to prevent further institutional damage.
Member States cannot continue to turn a blind eye to the financial, administrative, and legal disorder now unfolding inside the Secretariat. At some point, the responsibility for restoring order does not lie with staff struggling to expose the problem, but with the governments that created the institution in the first place.
Institutions rarely benefit from ignoring the warnings of the people who know their internal workings best.
At the International Seabed Authority today, the opposite seems to be the case: governance is left scrambling to catch up with arbitrary decisions that have already been taken.
In other words, decide first and worry about governance later.
Following my recent post on “Inside UNHCR: Women Staff Speak Out”, I have now received additional correspondence sent to UNHCR senior leadership and the High Commissioner’s office.
This letter was sent to me by a group of women staff members working within the United Nations system. It was shared with me in confidence for publication after internal reporting channels were exhausted.
The correspondence raises deeply serious concerns regarding an alleged case of sexual harassment and violent workplace behaviour, reportedly supported by multiple testimonies, yet closed without sanctions while the victims remained exposed, unsupported, and at risk.
In today’s global climate where scandals are exposing how easily powerful men are protected by powerful systems, the United Nations should be expected to demonstrate a more active, victim-centred, and protective approach toward its own staff members who report sexual harassment and abuse.
What this letter suggests is the opposite: a system that appears to protect reputations and careers, while leaving those who spoke up to absorb the consequences alone.
Even more troubling are the concerns raised about the possible role of senior officials in enabling, legitimizing, or shielding the alleged misconduct, and about administrative decisions that may have preserved the employability of the alleged perpetrator.
The letter below is published in the public interest, with identifying information redacted to protect those involved.
Disclaimer: This letter is published at the request of its authors. I am not a party to the matters raised.
Following my open letter to the Secretary-General on Fabrice Aidan, we have received a minimal and highly partial answer through the Spokesperson of the Secretary-General during yesterday’s noon briefing at UNHQ. The response does not resolve the questions raised; instead, it introduces a contradiction that undermines the credibility of the UN’s position. The Spokesperson’s response is worth examining carefully and contains multiple inaccuracies, to say the least.
Question: My second question. There is a UN staff. His name is Fabrice Aidan, whose name had been mentioned several times in Epstein files. He was passing messages from UN email to Terje Rod-Larsen to Epstein. And you have received a letter, and the SG received a letter asking why he was not investigated. When some UN staff showed some sympathy for Palestinians, they were instructed…
Spokesman: Well, I mean…
Question: To be quiet. But this case…
Spokesman: Abdelhamid, it’s a very valid question, but I wish you’d get your facts right. Mr. Aidan is not a UN staff member. He was a French diplomat who was seconded to the United Nations from about 2003 to 2013. He resigned in April 2013. At the time of his resignation, there was a disciplinary process under way against him on a specific matter. Now like many people, I’ve looked at a lot of the Epstein documents, and I can tell you that obviously there was no way for us to be aware of, we don’t monitor staff’s emails, so we have no way of, or people’s emails, we have no way of knowing what people are doing with their emails. It is clear that looking at what was sent, it was violation of procedures to send from a UN email documents that he should not have been sharing outside of the UN.
Question: What about Terje Rod-Larsen? He was a UN staff, and you know he was. And… and also, Aidan was a UN staff, and he signed his letters as [cross-talk].
Spokesman: Right. But what is your point? Because I’m telling you, he has not worked in the United Nations since April 2013. He resigned. At the time of his resignation, he was under investigation. Mr. Larsen stopped being a full time UN staff member on 31 December 2004. He was then, when actually employed, or a dollar a year, envoy while he served as President of IPI. I can tell you that our focus and everybody’s focus should be on ensuring that everyone follows our procedures and, also, focused on the victims of Mr. Epstein.
The Spokesperson instructed the journalist to “get your facts right.” The facts are not in dispute. They are documented, public, and verifiable. What is in dispute is the UN’s attempt to reframe those facts through selective terminology and incomplete disclosure.
1- Seconded Personnel Remain Subject to UN Administrative Jurisdiction
The UN Staff Regulations and Rules explicitly contemplate secondments and arrangements whereby individuals serve within the Secretariat under a UN appointment while remaining linked to their government administration. In practice, these individuals receive an index number, occupy a post, exercise UN functions, and are subject to UN internal governance and conduct requirements.
A person seconded from a government does not become exempt from UN accountability simply because the salary originates elsewhere. A secondment does not create a parallel moral universe where UN ethics do not apply.
The UN itself has a clear administrative framework for this category of personnel. Accordingly, the attempt to present Mr. Aidan’s secondment as proof that he was “not UN staff” is misleading and has no bearing on the applicability of the UN’s Staff Regulations, Rules, and disciplinary jurisdiction.
2- The UN cannot deny staff status while invoking an internal OIOS disciplinary process
The Spokesperson’s answer collapses under its own weight in the very next sentence.
He claims Aidan was “not a UN staff member,” but then states:
“At the time of his resignation, there was a disciplinary process under way against him…”
An internal OIOS disciplinary process presupposes UN jurisdiction, and therefore UN staff status. Aidan was apparently not “not UN staff”, yet the UN confirms he was under an internal OIOS disciplinary process.
OIOS and the UN disciplinary framework exist to investigate alleged misconduct within the Organization and to ensure compliance with the Staff Regulations and Rules by staff members serving under UN authority.
Either Mr. Aidan was subject to a UN OIOS disciplinary process, or he was not.
The United Nations cannot simultaneously assert that an individual falls outside the staff system, while also confirming that the individual was subject to an internal OIOS disciplinary process. It presupposes UN administrative jurisdiction and applies to personnel serving under UN authority and bound by the Staff Regulations and Rules.
The UN cannot rely on the terminology of “secondment” to dilute or recharacterize accountability. Staff members seconded from government service or from other organizations remain subject to the UN regulatory framework, including the Staff Regulations and Rules and the Standards of Conduct for the International Civil Service. Secondment is an administrative modality; it does not constitute an exemption from UN obligations, nor does it remove an individual from the Organization’s disciplinary jurisdiction.
Mr. Aidan was not operating in a vacuum. He was serving as a full-time P-5 official within the UN Secretariat under a letter of appointment reflecting his secondment from the French Government. That administrative detail has no bearing whatsoever on the applicability of the UN’s internal legal framework to his conduct.
3- The Spokesperson confirmed the breach of UN confidentiality procedures
In the most consequential part of the briefing, the Spokesperson expressly acknowledged that the material transmitted from the official UN email account constituted a breach of UN procedures. He stated:
“It is clear that looking at what was sent, it was violation of procedures to send from a UN email documents that he should not have been sharing outside of the UN.”
This statement amounts to a public confirmation by the UN Secretariat that the correspondence released in the Epstein files reflects an unauthorized disclosure of internal UN documents. the Secretariat itself has acknowledged that the conduct was incompatible with UN rules governing confidentiality and the handling of official information.
4- Terje Rød-Larsen: the UN’s own rules on gratis personnel prohibit precisely this conduct
The Spokesperson further attempted to neutralize Mr. Terje Rød-Larsen’s involvement by emphasizing that he ceased to be a full-time UN staff member on 31 December 2004 and later served as a “dollar-a-year” envoy while he served as President of IPI. This distinction is legally irrelevant. Whether staff or non-staff, Mr. Rød-Larsen was operating under UN authority and entrusted with access to sensitive information. The applicable obligations of confidentiality and discretion therefore remained fully engaged.
The Spokesperson’s explanation does not exonerate Mr. Rød-Larsen. On the contrary, it confirms that he continued to operate within the UN system under an engagement modality that falls squarely within the Organization’s administrative framework governing non-staff personnel.
The applicable instrument is ST/AI/1999/6 (Gratis personnel), which governs individuals serving within UN offices while not holding a standard staff appointment. The instruction is explicit: such personnel are bound by UN rules on confidentiality and are prohibited from communicating non-public information to external persons.
Section 11.2 of ST/AI/1999/6 provides:
“Gratis personnel shall exercise the utmost discretion in all matters relating to their functions. Unless otherwise authorized by the appropriate official in the receiving office, they may not communicate at any time to the media or to any institution, person, Government or other external authority any information that has not been made public, and which has become known to them by reason of their association with the United Nations or the receiving office.
They may not use any such information without the written authorization of the appropriate official, and such information may never be used for personal gain. These obligations shall continue after the end of their service with the United Nations.”
Accordingly, even assuming arguendo that Mr. Rød-Larsen’s engagement was on a “dollar-a-year” basis, the UN’s own administrative instructions make clear that he remained bound by strict confidentiality obligations. The transmission of Security Council briefings, internal diplomatic readouts, and privileged conversations, or other non-public UN information to an external private individual would constitute a direct breach of the applicable UN regulatory framework.
The Secretariat’s attempt to emphasize Mr. Rød-Larsen’s contractual modality therefore does not constitute an explanation. It underscores the institutional failure: individuals operating under UN authority, whether staff or gratis personnel, appear to have been able to transmit sensitive information externally over an extended period without effective oversight, accountability, or transparent consequences.
5- UNESCO’s subsequent recruitment of Fabrice Aidan is indefensible
It is now established that the UN Secretariat introduced an explicit, systematized mechanism for recording misconduct-related separations through ST/AI/2017/1 (26 October 2017), which provides for a “note to file” in the Official Status File when a staff member resigns before completion of disciplinary proceedings.
ClearCheck was subsequently introduced as a system-wide vetting mechanism in 2018.
But even before ClearCheck existed, every UN entity had a duty to conduct meaningful reference checks and consult prior UN service records.
And yet, Fabrice Aidan reportedly was reemployed by UNESCO under Audray Azoulay’s leadership between 2019 and 2023.
This raises the unavoidable question: how was a person who resigned from the UN Secretariat in 2013 while under a full-fledged disciplinary process later allowed to return to the UN system?
Who facilitated his recruitment and how?
6- Information Governance and Internal Security Controls
While it is fully accepted that the United Nations does not and should not engage in indiscriminate monitoring of staff email communications, this does not absolve the Organization of its duty to maintain effective governance, information security controls, and safeguards over the handling of privileged and confidential material.
The transmission of Security Council briefings, internal diplomatic readouts, and sensitive documentation is not an administrative triviality: it is precisely the type of information that should be protected through clear access controls, classification protocols, audit mechanisms, and enforceable confidentiality procedures.
If such material can be repeatedly extracted from official UN channels and transmitted externally over an extended period without detection, mitigation, or consequence, the issue is no longer limited to individual misconduct, it reflects a systemic failure of internal oversight and information governance
Finally, it is difficult to ignore the Spokesperson’s attempt to close the exchange by suggesting that “everybody’s focus should be… on the victims of Mr. Epstein.”
No one disputes the centrality of the victims in this criminal case. However, coming from the United Nations, this statement is disingenuous. The UN has repeatedly failed to adopt a genuinely victim-centred approach in its own internal misconduct cases, particularly those involving harassment and sexual abuse.
The Organization continues to receive and systematically mishandle countless reports from staff members, disproportionately women, many of whom refrain from reporting altogether due to well-founded fear of retaliation, and many of whom did report only to see their cases buried without meaningful consequence for perpetrators.
The UN should begin by demonstrating accountability towards its own internal victims before invoking “victim-centred” rhetoric as a means of deflecting legitimate questions of institutional responsibility.
It is also important to underscore that thousands of UN staff members are dismayed by the Fabrice Aidan case precisely because it stands in stark contrast to the stringent disciplinary measures routinely applied to ordinary staff members for minor deviations, perceived reputational issues, or administrative technicalities. Staff members are sanctioned, separated, or threatened for far less. Yet in this case, the documented misuse of official UN channels to transmit sensitive information externally appears to have unfolded over years with no transparent accountability.
This disparity raises serious questions not only about oversight and information governance, but also about vetting, institutional protection, privileged access, and the unequal application of rules within the Organization. It reinforces a perception widely shared among staff: that UN accountability is not applied uniformly, and that those embedded in elite networks or connected to influential figures are treated under a different standard than the workforce expected to comply without exception.
The United Nations can do better and must do better.
Today, I sent an open letter to the UN Secretary-General with one straightforward question: was Fabrice Aidan ever investigated while serving as a staff member of the UN Secretariat, in light of the DOJ-released Epstein correspondence and recent French reporting?
If the UN did investigate and took disciplinary action, then how was Aidan later able to re-enter the UN system and work at UNESCO between 2019 and 2023?
Was his record ever entered into ClearCheck: the UN’s system-wide screening mechanism meant to prevent the rehiring of individuals linked to misconduct?
And if the UN did not investigate, then what exactly did the Secretariat do when it was reportedly informed in 2013 of an FBI report concerning his alleged conduct?
If the UN did not investigate, it must explain why
If the UN did investigate, it must disclose the outcome.
The United Nations cannot claim to uphold rules it applies selectively. Accountability cannot be something imposed on the powerless while those embedded in elite networks are shielded from scrutiny.
Continued silence will only confirm what many staff have learned through experience: governance, ethics, and accountability operate in one direction only: downward.
For the past two years, United Nations staff around the world have been threatened, warned, and at times explicitly intimidated by senior management for daring to speak publicly about the genocide committed by Israel in Palestine. Multiple internal broadcasts were circulated across the UN system, emphasizing “neutrality” and the Organization’s intolerance for public commentary that could “damage” its reputation. In some duty stations, staff were effectively told that speaking out, even as private individuals, to denounce the genocide, could trigger disciplinary action leading to dismissal.
What makes this file explosive is not merely what it reveals about Fabrice Aidan. It is what it reveals about the United Nations itself: an organization that has spent the past two years policing staff speech on Gaza with threats of disciplinary action, while a UN official spent nearly eight years using his official UN email account to correspond with Jeffrey Epstein, circulating Security Council briefings, facilitating elite diplomatic access, and arranging protocol-level coordination for Epstein’s presence in high-level Middle East forums. This conduct unfolded quietly, without sanction, without apparent investigation, and without any comparable invocation of “neutrality” or “duty of discretion.” Discretion, it seems, is enforced only against those who speak about Palestine not against those who leak the Organization’s most sensitive material to sexual predators and child rapists.
The UN staff member is Fabrice Aidan.
His name appears unredacted in the Epstein files. Aidan was not a contractor, a consultant or an outsider. The correspondence identifies him as:
“Special Assistant to the Special Envoy of the Secretary-General” a staff member at a P-4 or P-5 level.
Aidan was a French civil servant at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and his diplomatic trajectory is particularly relevant. Before joining the UN system, he served at the French Embassy in Israel between 1998 and 2000. After his UN tenure for 8 years working as the Special Assistant of Terje Rød-Larsen, he transitioned into elite financial and influence networks, later becoming an advisor to the Edmond de Rothschild Group. This post-UN transition matters because it reflects continuity: the same individual who acted as a political access facilitator inside the UN system later resurfaced inside Europe’s high finance ecosystem.
His public footprint is also telling. Aidan’s own X/Twitter account reflects the type of political ecosystem in which he appears comfortable. In October 2023, he reposted a tweet by Hugues Serraf stating, in French, that
“life is always simpler when one is far-right, far-left, and/or a religious fanatic, because such people believe they hold absolute truth, have no moral hesitation, and can shout “death to so-and-so” with total serenity”
This repost is not a harmless political observation. It is Aidan publicly amplifying a message that treats extremist ideology as a lifestyle choice and makes “death to so-and-so” sound like an acceptable form of political expression. For a former French diplomat and UN insider, this is not merely tone-deaf. It is consistent with the profile emerging from the Epstein correspondence: a man for whom institutional norms were always negotiable, and for whom discretion was never about protecting the public interest, only about protecting the network.
The paper trail begins in May 2010. On 5 May 2010, Jeffrey Epstein appears to have identified Terje Rød-Larsen as a strategic entry point into UN Middle East diplomacy. Epstein wrote to none other than Peter Mandelson asking:
“do you know Therje Roed-Larsen. –Oslo accord United nations envoy?” EFTA00891863
Minutes later, after Mandelson replied “No, why?”, Epstein followed up, effectively justifying why Rød-Larsen mattered and why an introduction was worth pursuing. He described him as:
“one of the most powerful figures in the middle east. both sides- under sec general u.n.. in london for a few days” EFTA01812397
The language describes Rød-Larsen as a geopolitical lever.
Within months, Fabrice Aidan emerges in the correspondence as the operational channel through which Epstein is integrated into the UN-linked diplomatic orbit surrounding Rød-Larsen.
By October 2010, Aidan is already communicating with Epstein as if Epstein’s attendance at a closed diplomatic retreat is a normal administrative matter. The retreat in question was the 2010 Sir Bani Yas Forum, the inaugural edition of a high-level invite-only gathering hosted by H.H. Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The forum was designed as a discreet setting for ministers and senior global figures to discuss Middle East peace and security away from public scrutiny.
Epstein wanted in.
The correspondence shows Aidan handling the request personally. In one exchange, Aidan writes to Epstein:
“I need to speak with the FM UAE to add you on the list first and then they will contact you. What should be your title/affiliation for the invitation?” EFTA007532276
Epstein responds with a deliberately evasive and mocking suggestion, treating the invitation process as a joke and assuming, correctly, that UN officials would accommodate him anyway:
“I assume we can’t just write„- just an ordinary good guy, with a colorful past and a bright future?”
Instead of doing the one thing a UN official is paid to do, Aidan plays the role of facilitator and damage-control officer, treating Epstein’s fake “bio” as workable and framing potential objections as a problem to be contained:
“For me it would suffice, but you have some rigid people there too, that we need to contain.”
That phrase “we need to contain” is the type of language used by insiders protecting an operation, not by UN staff safeguarding institutional integrity.
The internal chain confirms that Epstein’s entry into Sir Bani Yas was not merely facilitated by Aidan but was directly tied to Terje Rød-Larsen’s intervention at the highest level. A message circulated among organizers states:
“Terje, after discussions with HH, has invited Mr. Jeffrey Epstein…” EFTA02421131
The same message apologizes for Epstein being added late:
“With apologies for this last minute addition, Terje would like that Mr. Epstein be added to the list of participants.”
Aidan himself confirms that the invitation was cleared with UAE leadership:
“As terje indicated, he cleared with HH that Jeffrey Epstein should be invited to the SBF.” EFTA2421068
The machinery then moves rapidly. UAE protocol officials request passport copies and photographs, explicitly referencing that the request was relayed through Aidan, who by then was the recognized channel for Epstein’s participation.
At this stage, the UN’s role is not subtle. The correspondence reflects a UN political office inserting Epstein into a closed forum where foreign ministers and high-level decision-makers convened under Chatham House rules. Epstein is processed through security clearance and logistics, while his team provides private jet details, passport pages, and headshot photographs as if this were a routine addition to an official diplomatic guest list.
By January 2011, the relationship evolves from invitation facilitation into protocol-level coordination involving Gulf leadership.
On 25 January 2011, Fabrice Aidan sends Epstein an email marked “Urgent” from his official UN address:
“Just tried to call you. Sh abdallah accepts the dinner with b gates. They need urgently a phone number for protocol coordination.” EFTA00648501
The message is notable not only for its content, but for its assumption: Epstein is treated as a relevant operational link in an interaction involving Sheikh Abdullah and Bill Gates. This is a UN staff member coordinating protocol requirements through Epstein.
The most serious part of the file, however, is not about access or dinners. It is about leaks.
In August 2011, a document titled:
“SG’s telephone conversation with FM of Turkey”EFTA02693326
appears in the correspondence chain reaching Epstein. The document concerns the former Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon’s private telephone conversation with Turkey’s Foreign Minister: a type of confidential readout that is normally restricted to a narrow circle within UN Headquarters.
The chain shows that the material was routed through the UN office channel associated with Fabrice Aidan.
The same pattern appears with Security Council-related documents. In October 2011, a document titled:
The tone clearly suggests this was not exceptional, and it was a routine transmission of UN reports to Epstein.
Then comes a detail that might seem absurd if it were not embedded in the same correspondence trail as Security Council briefings.
In August 2012, Epstein’s office requests shoe sizes for a luxury gift: personalized Stubbs and Wootton shoes with initials. Fabrice Aidan replies:
“Finally got the answer Edward size 7 EJRL Terje size 9 TRL” EFTA00553532
A UN official who had access to confidential Middle East diplomatic reporting and Security Council material was also providing personal details to facilitate luxury gifting from Epstein. It is the kind of exchange that signals closeness, loyalty, and a relationship cemented not only by political access but by personal indulgence.
By October 2013, the correspondence indicates that Aidan was actively shifting communications away from the UN as he was already working for Edmond de Rothschild Group.
He writes to Epstein:
“I saw that you sent me an email to my UN address. I check it not that often anymore. Best is to write to my personal one” EFTA01951288
This is a critical moment in the file. It suggests that what is publicly visible may only represent the portion of communications captured through UN systems. Anything routed through private addresses remains outside the record.
The financial dimension becomes more explicit in 2014, a time when Aidan was working with the Rothschild group. The correspondence includes discussions of transfers and wiring instructions linked to Terje Rød-Larsen and Epstein. One message states:
“Now being told 2 more days before we receive Terje 130,000”
Aidan then confirms that he personally intervened with the bank to resolve a transfer issue:
“I called the bank that suspended the transfer because of insufficient info related to the beneficiary bank id. All is set now. Apparently for amount above 50k, they are extra careful” EFTA00983426
By 2016, Epstein remains in direct contact with both Terje Rød-Larsen and Fabrice Aidan. In April 2016, he forwards them a link titled:
“Un scandale de pedophilie etouffe par le Quai d’Orsay” EFTA02466465
This is not a random link. Epstein is forwarding an article about a pedophilia scandal allegedly buried by the Quai d’Orsay to Terje Rød-Larsen and to Fabrice Aidan, a former French diplomat whose career was built inside that same institutional ecosystem. The obvious question is why Epstein assumed they would be receptive to this material, and what kind of familiarity or shared context made him comfortable circulating pedophilia-related content to them as if it were ordinary reading.
By 2017, Aidan appears fully embedded in elite private networks. Ariane de Rothschild writes to Epstein referencing travel and social encounters, and makes the following remark:
“I saw an amazing picture of a very happy Fabrice Aidan with MBS… Wow !” EFTA00954267
At that point, Fabrice Aidan is no longer merely a “former UN staff member” whose name happens to appear in an embarrassing email dump. He is the portrait of a system that protects the well-connected while policing the powerless. Because this is what the correspondence shows in plain sight: a UN staff member using his official UN email account to serve Jeffrey Epstein, sending Security Council briefings, arranging elite invitations, coordinating protocol with Gulf leadership, and facilitating access that no ordinary person could ever obtain.
And this unfolded quietly, year after year, without sanction, without apparent investigation, and without any serious enforcement of the UN’s own Standards of Conduct for the International Civil Service, standards that are not subject to selective application.
“Because disclosure of confidential information may seriously jeopardize the efficiency and credibility of an organization, international civil servants are responsible for exercising discretion in all matters of official business. They must not divulge confidential information without authorization. International civil servants should not use information to personal advantage that has not been made public and is known to them by virtue of their official position. These obligations do not cease upon separation from service. Organizations must maintain guidelines for the use and protection of confidential information, and it is equally necessary for such guidelines to keep pace with developments in communications and other new technology.”
This is precisely what makes the Fabrice Aidan correspondence so damning. The conduct documented in the DOJ files is not a grey zone. It is a direct contradiction of the UN’s own written standards: a UN staff member using his UN title, UN office, and official UN email account for nearly three years to transmit sensitive material, circulate Security Council briefings, and treat confidential diplomatic readouts as routine attachments while facilitating privileged access for Jeffrey Epstein.
Today, UN staff members are dismissed, disciplined, or threatened for the smallest perceived breach of outside activity rules, for speaking out, or for expressing the most basic solidarity with Palestinian children being dismembered under Israeli bombardment. Yet one of its own officials was allowed to operate as a political concierge for Jeffrey Epstein not in secrecy, but through an email trail so blatant that it reads like a parody.
This raises the question the UN will not answer: what kind of oversight, governance, ethics framework, or internal accountability does the Organization claim to have, if a staff member could conduct this level of misconduct in plain view for so many years? Or is “ethics” simply a disciplinary tool reserved for staff who are disposable while immunity, protection, and silence are extended to the elite, exactly as they were to Epstein?
It also raises a parallel question for the French government. Aidan was not a random opportunist. He was a French civil servant, posted to sensitive diplomatic assignments, including the French Embassy in Israel, later embedded in the UN, and then absorbed into elite financial networks. If the French state cannot account for how one of its own diplomats became operationally entangled with Epstein’s network, then the problem is not merely UN governance. It is national governance.
How many other Fabrice Aidans operated inside the UN system or still operate inside it, serving two masters, cultivating private allegiances, and treating public office as a currency of access? And how many more files remain buried simply because the names involved are too connected, too protected, too untouchable?
In IOM, a Chief of Mission has been sexually harassing a dozen female staff members, with the former Director General covering for him.
More than a dozen United Nations IOM female staff members filed independent complaints of sexual harassment against a current Chief of Mission.
The former Director General was formally apprised of these complaints, yet he took no action.
The PSEA focal point, entrusted with protecting victims and ensuring reporting of sexual misconduct, actively discouraged the complainants by stating
“If I had suffered sexual harassment by a senior staff member, I would not report it.”
The IOM Ombudsman did not fare any better, instead turning a blind eye.
The IOM sexual harasser continued in his functions as if nothing had happened.
Several staff members subsequently began experiencing retaliation in different forms.
When the Internal Office of Investigations finally decided to launch an investigation, many of the complainants chose to withdraw their complaints out of fear of being identified through their testimonies, even where anonymity was supposedly guaranteed.
The investigation was unfortunately protracted, to the detriment of many staff members, some of whom chose to leave the Organization altogether. At the same time, the IOM sexual harasser remains very much in place and without concern.
More worryingly, a 2022 External Evaluation of IOM’s Approach to Protection Against Sexual Exploitation and Abuse and Sexual Harassment noted in its final report a deeply troubling approach to dealing with sexual harassment at IOM with the report presenting an encouraging view that some forms of sexual harassment could be addressed through management action, or for informal mediation by the Office of Ombudsperson should the affected individual choose not to pursue a formal investigation.
This approach does not dissuade perpetrators from continuing predatory behavior. On the contrary, it has proven largely ineffective and extremely damaging. The dozens of women who complained in this case reached out to the former Director General, to the PSEA focal point, and to the Ombudsman. None of these actors deemed it necessary to stop the aberrant behavior.
When she assumed her functions as the new Director General of the International Organization for Migration on 1 October 2023, Amy Pope, the first woman to lead IOM in its history, stated in her speech:
“I pledge that IOM will put at its highest priority protecting the women and girls we serve.”
It is time to practice what you preach. The continued presence of a Chief of Mission accused by multiple female staff members of sexual harassment, after years of inaction, retaliation, and institutional failure, cannot be reconciled with it.
Amy Pope, the moment for statements has passed.
Accountability now requires immediate and decisive action.
In the wake of the open letter recently published from a feminist collective of UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency staff documenting two years of unresolved complaints involving intimidation, aggression, and a hostile work environment, and pointing to institutional failures across oversight, ethics, and human resources functions, I was contacted by aUNHCR junior staff member who wished to support the concerns raised.
The UNHCR staff member came forward to support the collective’s concerns and shared their official exit interview. I am publishing a summarized and redacted version of that testimony to protect anonymity.
While personal in nature, the account closely and independently corroborates the allegations made by the UNHCR collective of female staff, describing a work environment marked by harassment, intimidation, aggression, abuse of authority, humiliation, the absence of effective protection mechanisms, and a hostile work environment that ultimately led to resignation.
Taken together, these testimonies paint a grim picture of a toxic work culture within parts of UNHCR, where harassment and abuse of authority permeate the environment systematically.
The exit interview includes the following account:
“My manager shouted directly in my face and threw a folder containing World Refugee Day documents at me.”
That this incident involved World Refugee Day materials is difficult to ignore. It underscores the widening gap between the values UNHCR publicly promotes and the treatment experienced by staff behind closed doors and raises an uncomfortable question about what happens when dignity is not practiced internally.
At this point, it is fair to ask whether UNHCR’s exit interviews serve any purpose beyond documenting harm after staff have already left.
