| In
UN Swanson Promoted After Inner City Press
Scoop On His Guterres Hands in Pants
Cover-up
By Matthew
Russell Lee, Exclusive Patreon
Germany
- Honduras
- UN
Q - Tel
Aviv Austria
UN GATE, July 12
– After Inner City Press
published leaked audio, here,
of UN Office of Internal
Oversight investigator Ben
Swanson recounting being
ordered by UN Secretary
General Antonio Guterres
NOT to investigate sexual
harassment committed by a UN
Assistant SG, now in July 2021
Guterres has promoted Swanson
to the head of OIOS.
This for
twice protecting Guterres'
crony Fabrizio Hochschild -
amid the scandal of ASG's
hands up trousers of a female
D-1.
It is
outrageous, but par for the
course in Guterres' UN, from
which Inner City Press is
still banned after 1206 days.
And
Guterres' personal spies OIOS
under Swanson, like his UN
Security thugs including
Ronald E. Dobbins told to
target, rough up and ban Inner
City Press, now assert the
right to seize and search
personal cell phones in the
UN, in a message leaked to
Inner City Press:
"Thu 7/23/2020
9:23 AM - We wish to bring to
your attention an alarming
precedent established in a
recent (still unpublished)
decision issued by a United
Nations Dispute Tribunal
(UNDT) judge, which
jeopardises our right to
privacy going
forward. In her
decision, the judge endorses
the DMSPC/Administrative Law
Division’s argument whereby
Office of Internal Oversight
Services (OIOS) investigators
are entitled to seize any
personal IT device (cell
phone, laptop or desktop) that
has been used by a staff
member in conjunction with
their UN work (for instance,
by using a UN-issued SIM card
on your private phone, or by
installing UN licensed
software i.e. MS Outlook on
your personal
phone/laptop). The
legal question relates to the
interpretation of ST/AI/2017/1
(Unsatisfactory conduct,
investigations and the
disciplinary process) in
conjunction with
ST/SGB/2004/15 (Use of
information and communication
technology resources and
data). Based on the argument
of the Administration Law
Division, who supported the
OIOS’s practice of seizing of
personal devices, the UNDT
judge questionably ruled that
ST/AI/2017/1 overrides
ST/SGB/2004/15. It is
unfortunate that the judge
failed to observe that neither
ST/AI/2017/1 nor
ST/SGB/2004/15 stipulate in
any way or form the seizure of
personal devices.
The Staff Union disagrees with
this interpretation of the
rules, in view of the
definition of “ICT resources”
(Sect. 1.b) in the
higher-ranking ST/SGB/2004/15,
which should take precedence
and limit the provisions of
Sect. 6.2 of ST/AI/2017/1 to
those devices issued by the UN
that are “under the staff
member’s control”.
We believe this manner of
proceeding constitutes a grave
violation of a staff member’s
right to privacy and to their
private property. Needless to
say, that seizing of a staff
member’s personal phone and
laptop for a minimum of two
weeks would cause extreme
inconvenience to any colleague
who is involved in an
investigation, sometimes for
no wrongdoing of their
own. In sum, we
are calling on the OIOS to
suspend these practices,
especially under the current
working arrangements imposed
on staff due to COVID-19, when
many of us are required to use
our personal devices, due to
the fact that the Organization
was not always able to provide
UN-issued devices to ensure
business continuity.... We
advise all staff on this issue
and encourage you to
reconsider your use of
personal devices for
UN-related work, as well as
the utilization of any
UN-licensed software on your
personal devices."
In the leaked
audio, OIOS' Swanson says.
"this whole thing
of retaliation has got the
potential to cause us massive,
massive problems if we get it
wrong.” As he describes
the system, he says the U.N.
used to open an investigation
in response to a complaint,
“and it was taking a long time
because some of them are
horribly complicated and some
of them are just so trivial
that they’re just not worth
investigating entirely.”
He says the office trialed a
process of getting the
complaint from the U.N. ethics
office, at which point it
would write to the person
accused of retaliating against
a whistleblower or someone who
reported misconduct, and ask
them to “tell us why you’re
not guilty.” ”We’d
get the stuff … in from the
ethics office, we then write
to the subject and, I’m
paraphrasing here, saying,
‘Look, the ethics office have
said that prima facie that you
have retaliated therefore you
are guilty of retaliation
against Staff Member A, here’s
all the material, here’s the
ST/AI, write back to us in 10
days and tell us why you
haven’t … why you’re not
guilty of retaliation,'” he
says, to chuckles from others
in attendance.
Continuing, he says: “We’ve
managed to cut the time down
from 247 days down to about 45
because they write back
straight away and invariably
it’s ‘I don’t know anything
about a protected act and this
is nonsense, all I did was
send out an email telling
people to behave
themselves.'” “Then we
sort of make the judgment of
whether, is it worth getting
64gb of emails to prove that
they haven’t only sent the
email out, or do we take their
word, their sworn word, for it
and then say ‘well, ethics
office, there is never ever
going to be any sanction
imposed for this retaliatory
act, or whatever it’s called,
and we’re not going to do
anything else’?” He says
they are effectively doing the
ethics office's job and the
office had “swallowed it up
and accepted it. We’ve done
two now, and I think we’ve got
another two in the pipeline,
and it’s working quite nicely,
that brings the figures down
[and] that gets the Americans
off the U.N.’s back, [it]
means they don’t reduce their
contribution.”
Inner City Press
will continue to demand
re-accreditation.
***
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