Secretary-General Kofi Annan has approved long-delayed rules to protect UN employees from reprisals when they accuse superiors of misconduct, UN officials said late Tuesday.
The new rules, aimed at rooting out UN corruption and due to take effect on January 1, won quick praise as groundbreaking and a model for similar organisations from the Washington-based Government Accountability Project, which had advised the United Nations.
But the group said the UN General Assembly needed to take further action to ensure that the main UN internal watchdog agency, the Office of Internal Oversight Services or OIOS, was shielded from interference by top UN executives.
"They have made a really genuine effort to adopt state-of-the-art legal protections. The new rules are going to be a model for other intergovernmental organisations," said Melanie Oliviero, the group's international program director.
"But the issue of OIOS independence is still not fully resolved," she told Reuters by telephone from Washington.
Annan promised to bolster protections for whistle-blowers in June 2004 after a staff survey found UN employees believed little was being done to root out unethical behaviour and that workers who exposed wrongdoing might suffer for it.
But the new rules took more than 19 months to complete, despite a steady drumbeat of accusations against various UN officials in recent months, many of them linked to the now-defunct $64 billion oil-for-food program for Iraq.
The main UN bureaucracy has nearly 15,000 employees world-wide and a $1.8 billion annual budget. That does not include peacekeeping forces and 20,000 staffers who work in UN programs and funds.
The new rules will create an ethics unit in Annan's executive office to hear reports of reprisals or threats against staff reporting mismanagement or wrongdoing, and to discipline those found responsible.
The unit will report annually to the UN General Assembly on all the cases it handles and the actions it takes. A new whistle-blower review panel will watch over the ethics unit.
The rules give whistle-blowers the right to go to local law enforcement or the media to air their grievances if they are dissatisfied with the UN response.
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