[JURIST] The UN Appeals Tribunal (UNAT) [official website] last week overturned [ruling, PDF] a decision in favor of a whistleblower involved with the UN peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. James Wasserstrom, a US diplomat currently serving as an anti-corruption officer at the US embassy in Kabul, accused high-level colleagues of retaliating after he suggested that they had been involved in corruption during the mission. In its decision the UNAT applied previous rulings to find that their tribunal only has jurisdiction over certain decisions by specific UN bodies. This does not include decisions made by the UN Ethics Office [official website], the entity established to protect UN whistleblowers. Whistleblowers have expressed concern because the UN Ethics Office has not historically protected the whistleblowers who have sought their support.
Wasserstrom’s case has been ongoing for quite some time. His ordeal began in 2006, while working for the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) [official website], revealed that two of the senior officials in the department received bribes. He reported his findings to the UN Office of Internal Oversight [official website], which began an investigation into the allegation. Information gathered from the investigation supposedly leaked to the officials and Wasserstrom’s office was abolished upon which he accepted a consultant position with the Kosovo government. In 2007 he was detained by the UN police for his new position because it was deemed to represent a conflict in interest. His apartment and car were searched by the authorities without a search warrant. The case was then brought to the UNDT, which later ruled [JURIST report] that the UN Ethics Office failed to protect Wasserstrom, and specifically implicated UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon [official profile] in the failure. It is noteworthy that there had been constant tension between Ban and the judges appointed to the tribunal, as a couple years after Ban appointed the judges, they charged [JURIST report] him with attempting to limit their powers and “undermine the integrity of the Tribunal and its independence”.