Four years after the U.N. promised to address its internal “scourge” of sexual assault and abuse, the massive, multinational, extralegal institution remains in conflict with itself. mayjeong reports
Photo: YAIZA CARRETERO/EYEEM/GETTY IMAGES In the fall of 2010, Kirstie Campbell, a 32-year-old aid worker from Edinburgh, met a colleague named Mick Lorentzen at the bar of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan. Campbell and Lorentzen were both working for the United Nations World Food Programme, providing humanitarian relief to victims of Pakistan’s recent floods, one of the worst natural disasters in the country’s history.
Campbell considered filing a formal complaint with the WFP’s ombudsman. Lorentzen, however, had told her that he was a close associate of the WFP’s executive director who, Campbell believed, was in turn close to the ombudsman. Campbell’s belief rested on the fact that they were both Americans in an organization where factions form along national lines. Campbell decided not to report the incident until the WFP named a new ombudsman.
Despite such proclamations, U.N. staffers told me the day-to-day working environment inside the organization has remained mostly unchanged. The U.N.’s Office of Internal Oversight Services still only has nine investigators for all sexual-assault claims. “It is these nebulous discussions of jobs and offices that the U.N. likes to hide behind,” Priyanka Chirimar, a human-rights lawyer who worked for various U.N. war-crimes tribunals, told me. “High-profile announcements are a standard U.N.
Diplomatic immunity has been around for as long as states have needed to forge alliances and secure one another’s people safe passage. It is mentioned in ancient texts including the Indian epic Ramayana, the Herodotus histories, and the Quran. A few historical events aside, diplomatic immunity has largely been respected by most modern states. The U.N.’s topmost ranks have complete diplomatic immunity, which means they are protected even when not performing official U.N. duties. Everyday U.N.
The next high-profile scandal came in 2004, when Cynthia Brzak, an American U.N. staff worker, filed a sexual-harassment complaint against Ruud Lubbers, the former prime minister of the Netherlands, who was then the head of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. According to Brzak, after a meeting in the agency’s Geneva headquarters in 2003, Lubbers grabbed her from behind and pressed his groin into her buttocks. After Brzak filed her complaint, U.N.
Mission environments can be strange parallel universes where, in the lingo of U.N. workers, “geographically single” men keep “mission wives” and run deuxième bureaux, or “second offices.” In many remote posts, U.N. workers live in walled-off enclosures filled with trailers and tents´that serve as both lodging and office space. These compounds function more or less around the clock, and there is little boundary between one’s personal and professional lives.
More often, victims said they faced opprobrium from those they were meant to get support from. Another woman, who asked not to be named, described being raped twice by U.N. workers while working overseas, first with an aid organization and later with the U.N. She said that a U.N. worker whom she had never met before raped her while they were both working on tsunami relief in Indonesia in 2004. Five years later, after she was deployed to Afghanistan to work for the U.N.
The next turns in her case show the ups and downs of the organization’s recent reform efforts: By May 2020, her alleged assailant had been dismissed by the UNFPA for misconduct. In 2021, however, the matter is still the subject of ongoing litigation, showing how the process can spread over years. The alleged perpetrator denies the allegation and the UNFPA declined to comment.
The former employee filed a sexual-harassment case in 2018. Investigators found that sexual harassment had not occurred but that the accused had “failed to act as a role model.” As a result, he was demoted, barred from being promoted for four years, and provided with training “in matters related to professional conduct.
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