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.
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.
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.
This open letter was entrusted to me for publication by a group of women staff members working within the United Nations system.
It is formally addressed to Mr. Barham Salih, the newly appointed High Commissioner for UNHCR. The same concerns and supporting material were raised repeatedly over the past two years with his predecessor, Mr. Filippo Grandi, and were copied to the Secretary-General and senior UN leadership, without resulting action.
Written after the exhaustion of all internal mechanisms, the letter raises serious concerns about impunity, institutional silence, and failures of accountability within UNHCR, including the roles of oversight, ethics, and human resources functions.
I am sharing it in the interest of transparency, accountability, and informed public discussion.
*Disclaimer: This letter is published at the request of the authors. I am not a party to the matters raised.
The Commissioner-General of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, is presiding over the deliberate dismantling of the Agency by terminating Palestinian staff en masse under false administrative pretexts in the final weeks of his mandate.
In Gaza today, acting on his direct instructions, letters of termination are being issued withimmediate effectto more than 620 Palestinian teachers, staff who were suspended less than a year ago and deliberately placed into financial asphyxiation through so-called “exceptional leave.” They were removed from work, stripped of income, isolated from their duties, and left in enforced precarity. The same justification recycled without shame is nothing but the ongoing financial crisis.
The termination letters that we have seen and verified assert that
“after careful review, the Commissioner-General has decided, pursuant to Staff Regulation 9.1, to terminate in the interest of the Agency the contracts of staff,”
mechanically appending expressions of “regret” before declaring that employment is terminated “with immediate effect.”
These expressions are false. Each of them. The assertions of “careful review,” “regret,” and “the interest of the Agency” are not merely misleading; they are knowingly untrue and will be exposed before the UN Tribunal. The termination notices rely on formulaic language to mask decisions taken in bad faith, in advance, and for an improper purpose.
The invocation of “the interest of the Agency” is being used to justify the unlawful elimination of Palestinian staff. The claim of “careful review” conceals predetermined outcomes since February 2025. The expression of “regret” serves no legal function other than to cosmetically accompany an otherwise brutal administrative act. These terms are, in fact, misrepresentations deployed to manufacture legality where none exists. Their purpose is to insulate them from accountability, judicial scrutiny, and responsibility.
For twelve consecutive years, UNRWA has operated with an annual deficit ranging between USD 100 to 120 million. At no point during those twelve years was the mass termination of Palestinian staff advanced as a corrective measure. Not because it was overlooked, but because it was never a legitimate option.
UNRWA’s deficit is not an anomaly; it is a known, structural, and politically sustained condition. Donor states have long accepted, indeed, engineered a model in which the Agency functions under permanent financial shortfall. Savings measures, austerity cycles, hiring freezes, and programmatic compression have never eliminated that deficit, nor were they intended to. Yet the Agency has continued to operate, deliver services, and fulfill its mandate every single year under those conditions.
Nothing changed in January 2026 except the decision to terminate hundreds of Palestinian staff in Gaza, Jordan, and soon in Lebanon.
The mandate of UNRWA is not discretionary expenditure. It is a legal obligation to employ Palestinian refugees to serve Palestinian refugees across education, health, relief, protection, infrastructure, and microfinance. For those unaware: staffing with Palestinian refugees is not ancillary to the mandate; it is the mandate.
The termination of teachers is therefore not a budgetary adjustment. It is a deliberate act of mandate dismantlement, executed under the false pretense of financial necessity. What is being reduced is not cost, but Palestinian presence.
The Commissioner-General has no legal or moral authority to hollow out the mandate of UNRWA under the guise of financial management. Authority to administer the Agency does not include authority to dismantle it, and the CG’s budgetary discretion does not extend to extinguishing the very purpose for which the Agency exists.
The obscenity of these decisions is entrenched in the hierarchy that sustains them. The Acting Director in Gaza, a white Western European male installed through a procedurally unlawful appointment in direct violation of governing rules, as confirmed by an investigation under the Secretary-General’s authority, continues to occupy his position without consequence, earning over USD 17,000 per month,while terminating Palestinian teachers whose monthly salaries barely reach USD 1,000.
The administration now invokes urgency, inevitability, and the alleged absence of alternatives. None withstands scrutiny. The financial conditions cited are longstanding and well-known, and the timing exposes the design. Terminations are being carried out while collective appeals challenging the unlawful suspensions remain pending before the Tribunal, and while the Commissioner-General is approaching the end of his mandate.
More than 420 of these teachers have already filed a collective appeal with the UN Tribunal, challenging the legality of their suspensions and the denial of their salaries. The Commissioner-General’s sudden acceleration toward termination is nothing but a calculated attempt to render pending appeals moot by invoking Staff Regulation 9.1 and declaring, after careful review, that their contracts are ended in the interest of the Agency. Decisions are being rushed to pre-empt judicial review and to entrench faits accomplis before accountability can attach.
This is, in fact, the opening phase of a broader strategy that extends across UNRWA’s fields of operation, staff categories, and duty stations. The pattern is already replicating.
In Amman last Thursday, the Director of Security, another white Western European male whose appointment was also contested before the UN Tribunal, issued termination letters to 20 Palestinian security staff, barring them from UNRWA premises with immediate effect. Staff were informed that their functions would be outsourced to a private security company in order to “align with the rest of the UN system.”
That justification does not withstand even minimal legal scrutiny.
UNRWA is not a generic UN entity. Its mandate is singular and non-transferable: to employ Palestinian refugees in the service of Palestinian refugees. The outsourcing of Palestinian security functions to private contractors constitutes an ultra vires action. It exceeds administrative authority by displacing Palestinian staff from posts that are integral to UNRWA’s mandate. Procurement is being misused as a vehicle to achieve an outcome that management could not lawfully impose directly: the systematic exclusion of Palestinians from their own institution.
The invocation of “alignment” functions as a pretext to legitimize discriminatory impact, whereby Palestinian staff are removed en masse while senior international positions remain untouched. The financial disparity is undisguised. The Director of Security earns between USD 12,000 and 13,000 per month. The Palestinian staff he terminated earn approximately USD 800 per month. Senior management positions remain untouched; Palestinian livelihoods are declared expendable.
The moral arithmetic speaks for itself.
In Beirut, preparations are underway for the same maneuver. Approximately 100 Palestinian staffare expected to face termination under identical pretexts, using the same administrative language and the same manufactured justifications.
These measures are being executed at the very beginning of the year, and in the final weeks preceding the Commissioner-General’s departure at the end of March, the formal conclusion of his contract. This is the terminal phase of a policy implemented with the knowledge that accountability will soon be evaded through exit.
Following the closure of UNRWA’s Jerusalem headquarters, the dismantling has shifted inward. Field offices and headquarters are now being systematically hollowed out through attrition, termination, and outsourcing. The pattern is consistent, sequential, and intentional. This trajectory mirrors, with precision, the long-articulated objective of the Israeli government: the dismantling of UNRWA not through formal abolition, but through internal erosion: reducing staff, extinguishing functions, and stripping the Agency of its Palestinian core while preserving the façade of institutional continuity.
What is unfolding is a systematic, progressive, controlled disintegration.
When the Commissioner-General assumed office, UNRWA’s staffing table reflected approximately 31,000 Palestinian staff positions, including 13,000 in Gaza. These figures are still cited publicly, with confidence and repetition.
They are false.
Insider data confirms that UNRWA’s staffing has fallen to approximately 23,000 positions. Posts have been abolished incrementally and without transparency, with the most severe acceleration occurring over the past two years. In Gaza alone, staff numbers have collapsed from 13,000 to approximately 9,000, a consequence of deaths caused by Israeli attacks, forced retirements, and now, deliberate mass termination.
The plan is no longer deniable.
UNRWA is being dismantled from within by a senior Western European management cohort that continues to invoke humanitarian language while administering collective punishment against Palestinians, many of whom are simultaneously mourning family members killed by the very government whose political objectives these measures now advance.
No Western European Director or senior official within UNRWA has demonstrated the moral courage to halt these actions. None has objected. None has refused to execute them. These officials retain their positions by implementing decisions without scrutiny or resistance. Their allegiance is not to the mandate, nor to Palestinian refugees, but to institutional survival. In that sense, they operate as mercenaries: well compensated, insulated from consequences, and valued only for their willingness to comply.
As for the Commissioner-General, he has nothing to lose. His term ends in March 2026. His exit is secured. The same is likely true for those closest to him. Decisions are taken with the certainty that consequences will not follow. Quite the opposite: they are likely to be rewarded; absorbed into other senior roles, compensated by Western governments that continue to support Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people, and repositioned within the UN system to carry forward the same discriminatory practices under different institutional banners.
The decision to terminate 650 Palestinian staff in a single day, taken in the final weeks of the Commissioner-General’s tenure, is unprecedented in the history of both the United Nations and UNRWA. Such a measure: massive in scale, irreversible in effect, and executed at the very end of an executive mandate, raises serious questions about the continued propriety of allowing the Commissioner-General to exercise unfettered executive authority. When a senior official accelerates irreversible decisions at this scale immediately before departure, the issue is no longer administrative discretion but abuse of authority in anticipation of exit.
This conduct warrants scrutiny not only of the decision itself, but of the conditions under which it was taken. Reasonable questions arise as to whether assurances have been given, whether consequences have been neutralized in advance, and whether accountability has been effectively suspended. In any other institutional context, such circumstances would trigger immediate restraint, oversight, or the withdrawal of delegated authority.
Where, then, is the Secretary-General of the United Nations in all of this? What justification exists for permitting a departing Commissioner-General, Philippe Lazzarini, to take decisions of historic magnitude in the final months of his tenure, with consequences that will long outlast his presence and fall entirely on Palestinian staff?
In mythology, when power abandoned humanity, it was Prometheus who defied it, who stole fire knowing the cost, not for recognition, not for permission, but because survival demanded action. He did not wait for consensus. He acted because inaction meant destruction.
Who, then, will act for Palestinian UNRWA staff?
Who will defy the machinery rather than continue to service it? Who will intervene when legality is being weaponized and procedure is being used to erase livelihoods?
Palestinian UNRWA staff are being erased while the world watches it happen in real time. Some are burying their families. Others are sleeping in shelters. And now they are being told, formally, politely, with immediate effect, that even their livelihoods are no longer allowed to survive.
This is how a mandate is killed: quietly, disingenuously, and from within, by the very official, Mr. Lazzarini, charged with safeguarding it, in direct violation of the oath attached to his office.
So where is Prometheus now? Who will defy power when survival demands it, rather than administer harm in its name?
The humanitarian system rests on a single, non-negotiable premise: do no harm. What is unfolding here is its deliberate inversion: do more harm. Terminate more Palestinian staff. Remove livelihoods. Deepen displacement. Align administrative decisions with the Israeli government’s long-stated objective of dismantling UNRWA and reducing the Palestinian presence in Gaza.
Yes: Do More Harm: Systematically and with Intent: One Termination Letter At A Time.
Not because it is lawful. Not because it is unavoidable. But because those authorizing it are insulated from its consequences, and because they calculate that Palestinian lives, Palestinian labour, and Palestinian rights can be extinguished administratively without cost.
This is how senior officials like Lazzarini participate in erasure: by choosing harm, authorizing it on paper, and enforcing it without ever having to fire a single shot.
Palestinians will remember you because you failed to protect them, failed to uphold the mandate entrusted to you, and willingly chose to inflict harm upon them, no different, in the end, from those who openly act as their enemy.
“I would not let the UN teach me morals. Having a baby in Africa is nothing. Where one has a baby, she wanted a baby. How many people have babies here? The UN does not understand that. The UN thinks that she has been victimized by the UN staff who came. No, it’s the opposite.”
This was the shocking statement of a MONUSCO international staff member to the UN tribunal after he was dismissed for sexual exploitation and abuse of a local woman in Goma.
Last week, the UNDT rendered a damning judgment UNDT/2025/089, Compaore v. Secretary-General, which evidences a systemic collapse of compliance with the principle of “do no harm” among UN international staff and highlights the widening gap between the Organisation’s proclaimed norms and its operational realities.
What the Tribunal recounts next reveals a level of predation that documents the institutional inability to give effect to every policy, every training, and every public assertion that the Organisation upholds the principle of ‘do no harm”.
“The staff member met the local woman when she was selling vegetables on the roadside in Goma took her number and, within days, he was having regular sexual intercourse with her.
He knew that there was a notable status differential between him, an international United Nations staff member and the SEA survivor, a seller on the market in Goma.
The woman earned between USD 10 and USD 25 per month… she was also supporting her ten-year-old son. By contrast, the staff member’s net salary was approximately USD 14,000 per month.
He visited her at her house and started giving her significant sums of money up to half of her month’s earnings as well as promised to help opening her own business…
…when the victim informed him that she became pregnant as a result, he reacted angrily, and called her a ‘prostitute’ and ‘thief,’ telling her to leave his house.
He then took the local woman far to meet with a pharmacist that he knew, using a UN vehicle. At the location of the pharmacist, he asked her to do a pregnancy test, which was positive.
He then asked the pharmacist how they could arrange an abortion even though the local woman informed him that she did not want to abort. He then organized a meeting at a hotel in Goma, during which the pharmacist pressured the local woman to get an abortion; and he gave her US$ 400.00 (i.e. the equivalent of four months’ income or seven months’ rent for her) to financially incentivize her to get an abortion.
After giving her the money for an abortion, he filed a criminal complaint against her, accusing her of harassing him and of claiming money from him. In his complaint, he requested the police to verify if she was still pregnant, while being aware that abortion is a criminal offence in the DRC.
He then made the local woman sign an agreement in exchange of USD 8,000 payment. As part of this agreement, the local woman also signed a letter withdrawing allegations against him which were then pending in the local court.”
I mean if this is the outcome of years of UN training on “do no harm” then we are forced to confront the undeniable truth: something is not merely broken: something is rotten at the core. And perhaps the deeper tragedy is this: people have become so accustomed to this pattern of abuse that they have grown desensitized to it. These cases no longer shock; they are absorbed as routine background noise.
We must ask ourselves: who is reading these stories? Who is outraged? And why is this not shaking the Organisation to its foundations?
What is truly galling is that the international staff member stood before the Tribunal and insisted the relationship was consensual. The Tribunal, drawing on Makeen 2024-UNAT-1461, para. 52, citing Lucchini rejected this narrative entirely, establishing that in the face of glaring economic deprivation and an overwhelming power differential, genuine consent was impossible. Sex in such a situation is inherently coercive and any claimed consent collapses under legal and ethical scrutiny.
The Tribunal also held that the survivor’s “withdrawal of the complaints in domestic proceedings, following an $8,000 financial settlement,” does not absolve the perpetrator nor constrain the UN’s authority to act, since national acquittals do not extinguish administrative responsibility.
The staff member disputed the proportionality of his dismissal, arguing that a mere reprimand or censure would have sufficed. This position attempts to recast predatory conduct as a correctable misjudgment rather than misconduct of such severity that it renders continued employment untenable. It is a defence that collapses on its face when measured against the Organisation’s core obligations and basic standards of conduct.
The problem is just like the genocide in Palestine, people have become used to harm so much that these stories pass almost unremarkable. And the UN surely counts on this.
The Secretary-General’s report reduces survivors to numerical entries processed through a statistical frame that neutralizes emotional and moral response. As with the enumeration of Palestinian casualties, human beings are converted into data units. Numerical abstraction becomes the mechanism of desensitization.
Let me give you a few examples of what the dashboard reveals. Under the category of UN staff and related personnel:
Less than a week ago, on 20 and 21 November, two separate allegations were recorded against WHO personnel for sexual exploitation.
On 30 October, an allegation was filed against IOM for rape of a child by a UN Volunteer.
On 23, 21 and 20 October, three distinct allegations were filed for sexual assault of children under 18 in both IOM and UNRWA.
According to the same data, for 2024, children constituted 15% of victims, and disturbingly, an additional 17% were listed as “victim age unknown.” That alone illustrates how incomplete or deliberately under-specified the reporting is. For the same year, rape accounted for 13% of allegations, and sexual assault 20%. Assistance was provided in only 20% of cases, with the remainder categorized on the dashboard as “victim declined,” “victim did not seek assistance,” “victim unidentified,” or “victim unreachable.” This is the measure in practice of “do no harm” and of the supposed restoration of victims’ dignity.
Then there is the separate category of implementing partners whose personnel are not formally under UN authority but who execute UN-funded projects.
On 4, 8, 9, 19 and 28 November 2025, five allegations were lodged for sexual assault, two involving children under 18 in connection with UNICEF-supported activities.
On 9, 14, 16 and 19 October 2025, another four allegations were recorded, three of which were also for assault of children under 18, again linked to UNICEF-related projects.
I mean yes, these individuals are not UN staff; they are personnel of implementing partners. But the question is unavoidable: is the UN exercising due diligence over the entities it entrusts with its mandate?
Does the UN engage implementing partners to improve conditions for children, or are these partnerships, through negligence or indifference, creating new avenues for their abuse?
In 2025 so far, there have been 41 allegations of rape, of which 37 involved children under 18. These were linked to projects implemented for:
UNICEF (14)
WFP (13)
WHO (4)
UNOPS (4)
UNHCR (3)
OCHA (1)
In 2024, children under 18 accounted for at least 28% of all SEA allegations and that figure is conservative, given that an additional 24% of victims were listed as “age unknown.”
Rape constituted 12% of total allegations that year.
Then there is the category of peacekeeping and special political missions, where rape of children is clearly systemic. It is easier to avert one’s gaze, but perhaps this is precisely where scrutiny must intensify.
And here I am also analyzing numbers. This is the trap inherent in quantitative reporting: patterns and ratios take over, and the individual victims disappear. Behind each statistic is a life: a child with a name, a family, a history, a future now fractured.
Who explains to a 10-year-old boy that he will be alright after being raped? Who provides care and schooling for a child born of sexual exploitation? Who treats the psychological, physical, and social scars inflicted by those who arrived under the blue flag claiming protection?
Why are we still here? Why are we reading these findings while maintaining the fiction that the UN enforces a zero-tolerance policy on sexual exploitation and abuse? Each year we hear the same prescriptions: more funding, more training, more risk-mapping, more awareness. Yet the same patterns recur.
The Secretary-General’s report to the General Assembly is extensive and data-heavy, but this is precisely the problem: its architecture buries the actual crisis under layers of metrics and operational jargon. And there, almost unnoticed in the middle of the document, sits the real revelation:
In 2024, 64,585 United Nations staff members responded to the annual perception survey on protection from sexual exploitation and abuse. Of those, 3.65% (2,360 people) stated that it was acceptable to pay for sex, and close to 1% (555) indicated that it was acceptable to engage in sexual activity with a child, with one-third of those respondents occupying supervisory roles.
This alone reveals how embedded and normalized the culture of sexual exploitation and abuse has become within the UN and this does not even account for uniformed personnel, national police contingents, or military forces contributed by Member States to peacekeeping missions.
So why is the situation not improving and in several respects deteriorating? Policies are revised, bulletins updated, special coordination units created, but the real deficit lies in accountability, and not only accountability for the direct perpetrator.
And what about the perpetrators who are shielded rather than sanctioned? What about the cases quietly buried because they involve personnel with the right connections or the right nationality? What about internal directives to “avoid reputational exposure” that override the rights of victims?
The UN pursues low-level offenders as symbolic sacrifices while preserving the machinery that protects enablers, decision-makers, and silent bystanders. The Organization reports terminations as proof of resolve, yet accountability is never directed at those within HR, Legal, Ethics, or senior management who intervened to suppress complaints, stall proceedings, or intimidate victims. That is where the deeper accountability lies, and that is precisely where none is exercised.
Why is there no scrutiny of the senior officials who instruct HR and Legal to make cases “go away”? What about the victims who never report, either out of fear or because the system has taught them that nothing will happen? What about the managers whose first instinct is to protect their own reporting profile before the Security Council or the General Assembly? And what of the Legal and HR officers who invoke “insufficient evidence” as a procedural shield as though the absence of formal proof were not itself often the product of investigative indifference or institutional suppression?
The Secretary-General’s own report acknowledges that since 2006, approximately 750 paternity and child support claims arising from UN peace operations have been recorded with over 500 still unresolved. Most Member States have failed to take any meaningful steps toward resolution. Meanwhile, the children born of these abuses, many now approaching adulthood, remain without schooling, without healthcare, without legal recognition, and trapped in lifelong stigma. They live in conditions of uncertainty and marginalization, the direct human legacy of UN negligence.
Protracted investigation and disciplinary timelines are cited as “systemic challenges,” but they function as structural impediments to justice. Delays in inquiry, opaque handling of outcomes, and the absence of visible consequences reinforce a culture of impunity and corrode the Organization’s credibility. Even now, there remains no real accountability for those in leadership who failed in their obligation to act. The burden falls only on the isolated offender, never on those who enabled, ignored, or suppressed the cases.
Alarmingly, in 2024, the internal survey itself recorded a stark indicator of institutional distrust: 6% of UN respondents,roughly 3,700 staff expressed no confidence in leadership’s ability to address sexual exploitation and abuse, up from 3% the previous year.The doubling reflects a measurable deterioration in trust in leadership.
The reality we must confront is this: a child in Bangui may flee from what he perceives as the threat (the militia or armed group) and run instead toward the UN blue helmets, whom he believes to be protectors. But the risk now is that he runs straight into the arms of his abuser. The UN’s personnel (civilian and military) leverage the UN’s image as a guardian and savior to secure access to vulnerable populations. They weaponize the very trust invested in the UN.
This is what makes the situation intolerable: the UN is not a bystander to these violations but the mechanism through which access to victims is enabled. When trust itself becomes the instrument of abuse, the UN mission has already failed at its fundamental duty: protection
