We are about to learn the meaning of “ethics” in the United Nations administration of Ban Ki-moon. Eight months after Secretary-General Ban took office, promising to “restore trust,” he has been presented with a simple test, via the case of a former employee of the U.N. Development Program, Artjon Shkurtaj.

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So far, amid a welter of U.N. delays, denials, evasions, and broken promises, it looks like Ban is about to flunk.

UNETHICAL ACTIVITIES
Who is Artjon Shkurtaj? Thirty-six years old, Albanian born, but fluent in English, he goes by “ Tony.” He is a U.N. whistleblower caught up in the scandal over the U.N. Development Program — flagship agency of the U.N. — funneling hard cash to the regime of Kim Jong Il in North Korea. Shkurtaj worked for years for the UNDP, and from 2004-2006 served as the UNDP’s chief of operations and security in North Korea. From there, witnessing one UNDP outrage after another, he tried to do his part to restore trust, by prodding his bosses at the UNDP to behave with integrity and follow their own rules. They told him not to make trouble.

Shkurtaj finally blew the whistle outside the UNDP, one of a number of voices calling attention earlier this year to such UNDP abuses as the funneling of hard cash to the rogue regime of Kim Jong Il. He also called attention to the UNDP’s curious habit of keeping $3,500 in unreported counterfeit U.S. banknotes for years inside its office safe in Pyongyang. This March, the UNDP fired him.

Shkurtaj protested that he had been sacked in retaliation for his whistle-blowing. UNDP officials denied this, saying Shkurtaj was on a short-term contract that had simply expired.

Fortunately, or so one might have supposed, the U.N. has made provision for such situations. Annan, during his scandal-driven departing bout of reform last year, set up a U.N. Ethics Office, housed in the Secretariat and reporting to the secretary-general. Among other things, the Ethics Office was tasked to protect whistleblowers from such retaliation as being shoved from their jobs.

So, Shkurtaj took his case to the U.N. Ethics Office. There, the ethics director, Robert Benson, a Canadian, took several weeks longer than expected, but on Friday finally produced a confidential memo addressed to the head of the UNDP, Administrator Kemal Dervis, and copied to Ban and a number of others. That memo leaked almost immediately to the press. In it, Benson backed Shkurtaj. Benson mentioned “independent and corroborative information” for this finding. He saw grounds that “a prima facie case had been established” that the UNDP was punishing Shkurtaj for his whistle blowing.

But it also turns out that the UNDP, which has no ethics office of its own, is refusing to recognize the “jurisdiction” of the U.N. Secretariat’s Ethics Office. Benson discussed this in his memo, urging the UNDP’s Kemal Dervis to reverse course and abide by the advice of the Ethics Office, and allow a U.N. investigation to go forward into whether Shkurtaj was sacked — wrongly — for following U.N. ethics guidelines promulgated on Dec. 19, 2005, which state that it is the “duty” of staff members to report any breach of U.N. rules, and that any staffer who does so in good faith has “the right to be protected against retaliation.”

The UNDP won’t play ball. A UNDP official says the agency is making its own arrangements for a “complementary external review,” that would cover both its North Korea operations and Shkurtaj’s allegations, and that there will be a board meeting to discuss the matter this Thursday, August 23. That’s not much comfort. This is the same board that is not allowed by UNDP management to see the UNDP’s own internal audits, and whose 36 members include not only the U.S. (which has been trying to clean up the UNDP), but such ethics-challenged governments as those of China, Russia, Belarus, Algeria, Kazakhstan, and North Korea itself.

At the U.N. Secretariat, this intra-U.N. stand-off led to a bizarre series of exchanges at Monday’s noon press briefing, in which reporters tried to find out what Ban plans to do about the UNDP’s rejection of the “jurisdiction” of the U.N. Secretariat’s Ethics Office. According to U.N. spokeswoman Michele Montas, this turf problem was news to Ban himself, and he is now “examining” the Ethics memo.

Of course, U.N. legalities are an odd concept for an institution that operates outside any normal system of law. A panel of legal experts, including respected U.K. Queens Counsel Geoffrey Robertson, hired by the staff union to examine the U.N.’s internal “judicial” system, reported last year that the U.N. is in violation of its own human-rights standards. One could go on to debate the endless niceties of what now appears to be a system of ethical — or unethical — U.N. apartheid, in which whistleblowers at the UNDP are evidently not entitled to the kind of protection now promised to those in the Secretariat.

But that way lie the dark realms of the classic U.N. cover-up, in which delay, denial, and bureaucratic buzz finally bore to death any normal person who might otherwise spot the real problem and be outraged enough to demand real remedies. So let’s talk about what’s actually going on here.

SOVERIGN STATE WITHIN THE U.N.
Quite simply, the UNDP is, for most practical purposes, morphing from a development agency into a species of highly privileged rogue state — operating, it seems, outside any jurisdiction. In theory the UNDP reports to the General Assembly, but to suggest that any actual oversight takes place is a joke. The General Assembly is a sprawling 192 member-state committee. Last year its members scrapped a package of U.N. management-reform proposals rather than jeopardize via even a slight increase in transparency and accountability their vast lattice of politicized U.N. berths, boondoggles, and special interests. You’d get better results reassigning the UNDP to report to a random group of shoppers at your local supermarket.