UN
Secretariat Wants More Funding
for Resident Coordinators,
Won't Tell Press How Staffers
Paid
By Matthew
Russell Lee, Exclusive Series
UNITED NATIONS,
March 23 – How will the UN
Secretariat under Antonio
Guterres pay for the new
positions he is proposing but
not disclosing, most recently
on March 22? With UN spokesman
Farhan Haq refusing to provide
any list of who works on the
38th floor and how they are
paid, other sources tell Inner
City Press of a proposal for
the Secretariat to take over
some of the funding for the UN
Resident Coordinator system
administered by the UN
Development Program. While
there are good Resident
Coordinators, Inner City Press
has also written about Ban
Ki-moon son in law Siddarth
Chatterjee, given the top
Kenya post by his own father
in law without recusal, and
now Najat Rochdi, who covered
up Cameroon's abuse of the Anglophone
western part of the country.
Both of them block Inner City
Press on Twitter. This is
today's UN.
How transparent,
or
intentionally opaque, is
today's UN? After Inner City
Press exclusively reported
that staff on the UN's 38th
floor were paid through the UN
Office of Project Services and
not the regular budget, the UN
admitted it but refused to
answer Inner City Press' follow
up questions. From the UN's
transcript:
Inner City Press:
On the answer on UNOPS.
I wanted to, I guess, ask it a
little bit broader, because my
understanding is that there's
a proposal to the Fifth
Committee to approve a number
of new positions on the 38th
Floor. But, until they
rule… so I guess I wanted to
know, rather than piss and…
you know, pick and… pick and,
you know, choose and see if
you say that… I heard
Lusophone; you said no
Lusophone. I heard
UNOPS; you said, yes, one
UNOPS. Can I ask you
generally about UNDP [United
Nations Development
Programme]? And two,
could you just provide a list
of the people that have been
hired on [the 38th Floor] to
work on political matters and
whether, in fact, they have
posts currently in the UN
budget, and if they don't, how
they're being paid? You
could even do it without the
names, but there's a lot of
questions that people have
about people hired where
there's no underlying posts to
be filled.
Deputy Spokesman:
Okay. Well, the bottom
line is that, as I made clear
just now, all of this… all the
questions of posts are that
they go through the normal
budgetary process. And
so, whatever posts we have for
the 38th Floor will be posts
that we get approved from the
budgetary system.
Inner
City
Press: But,
I guess my… my question is,
until May and these posts are
approved, are you saying that
there's nobody that's working
on [the 38th Floor] for which
a post has yet to be approved
by the Fifth Committee?
That's the question that I'm
asking.
Deputy Spokesman:
Whatever the posts are, those
are posts for which we're
seeking budgetary funds from
the 38th… from the budgetary
committees.
Inner
City
Press: But,
if you haven't received the
approval yet, how do you pay
them?
Deputy Spokesman: There
are ways to pay people up
until you get the funding, but
we're going to go through the
normal budgetary process as we
do through the previous
Secretaries-General, as well.
Inner
City Press: Can
you just put out a fact sheet
on that? I guess what
I'm wondering is, it does seem
if there's… if people are
being paid and it's yet to be
approved, there's obviously
some lack…
Deputy Spokesman: The
facts are all information that
are provided to the budgetary
committees. They have
that, and it's their
information.
Inner City
Press had asked UN Secretary
General Antonio Guterres' top
two spokesmen simple factual
questions: who works on the
38th floor? Who pays them? But
the two, both holdovers from
the Ban Ki-moon
administration, refused to
answer, so on March 20 Inner
City Press published its scoop
about the murky use of trust
funds to pay people on the
UN's 38th floor. Even on March
21 when Inner City Press asked
Guterres' deputy spokesman
Farhan Haq who pays whom, he
refused to answer. Video
here; from the UN
transcript.
Inner
City Press: It would be
important for the public to
know if somebody working on
the 38th Floor is, in fact,
paid by a country as opposed
from the regular budget.
Deputy Spokesman: The
financial details of how the
Executive Office works, all
that is shared with the
relevant budgetary committees
of the General Assembly, and
so they have that information.
Well not really.
Haq and his boss Stephane
Dujarric refused for four days
to answer this: "This is a
Press request for a list of
who is working in the
Executive Office of the
Secretary General; within
that, who is paid by the UN
general budget, who is paid by
or through any other
UN-affiliated fund and who
funds that, and who is paid by
/ seconded from a
country." Why not just
answer?
On March
20, as Inner City Press
pointed out the seeming
hypocrisy not only of the UN
preaching media freedom while
having evicted and still
restricting Inner City Press
but also of an all-male UN
team meeting with the DR
Congo, it was told Yes, UNOPS
is involved, citing to General
Assembly documents saying that
some working in the UN do not
have to be categories, or
disclosed, as staff. But isn't
this opacity simply inviting
budget cuts? We'll have more
on this.
***
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