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By Matthew Russell Lee & sources, Exclusive

UN GATE, April 3 – UNESCO, like the whole UN system under Antonio Guterres was been falling apart in corruption and fraud.

  Inner City Press has been reporting on serious malfeasance by the French Audrey Azoulay administration at UNESCO in Paris, almost as bad as Antonio Guterres' corruption in and of the UN in New York. A fish rots from the head.

The UNESCO corruption series is now132 stories long.  In our latest article about UNESCO of March 24, we wrote that Mexico pushes a dubious candidate for next DG (here )

Since then, and as we anticipated in our article, Mexican candidate Gabriela Ramos, former ADG for Social and Human Sciences, has left the Organization. She is now expected to leave as well the race for the next UNESCO DG soon.  We also wrote that Gabriela Ramos was authorized by DG Azoulay to exercise totalitarian control over staff, including intimidation, harassment and abuse of power. In recent years, DG Azoulay has taken no administrative action against her until IOS report number 2024/02, of December 2024.  In defense of Ms Ramos, her team argues that the report isn't so bad for the Mexican candidate, since only two “lazy” staff members complained against her after she had reasonably criticized them for not doing the expected work. This rhetoric has no basis in fact, but it could strike a chord with those member states that don't have all the information they need.

 Despite the Azoulay administration's best efforts to conceal the facts, here's why Gabriela Ramos has to accept reality: in her current status as a top manager with proven gross misconduct, she no longer has a place in the race and must step down:  1) This is not a matter of “two lazy staff members” but a collective action by nearly ten SHS staff members who have officially complained against Gabriala Ramos.  2) If the accusations had been considered minor, DG Azoulay would never have issued a Letter of charges against Ramos.  3) The Director of the Internal Oversight Services (IOS) Division, Bernardin Assiene, would already have been dismissed if the accusations had been fabricated and not based on solid grounds;  4) The case of ADG Ramos was very sensitive.

Given her close relationship with the former OECD boss, who is also a good friend of former French President François Hollande, the man who pushed Azoulay against the Arab candidates in 2017, IOS decided not to conduct the investigation itself, but to outsource it by contracting an American auditing firm working worldwide. We then discovered that the investigation report was written in French by the French branch of the American company and more specifically by the French investigator Mme Blandeau, in charge of the Paris office.

  5) This means that the investigation into Gabriela Ramos's systematic misconduct and harassment of SHS staff members was validated by the American company, by IOS and then by DG Azoulay. It is therefore childish for Ramos and her team to try to minimize the seriousness of the accusations in these circumstances. What's more, DG Azoulay's protection has its limits, and Ramos is effectively being thrown under the bus in the same way as her fellow ADG for Management and Administration, the British Nick Jeffreys, was. He left UNESCO in a hurry, and Ramos must do the same if she is to retain any dignity.  The position of the Mexican government is therefore expected in that regard, since if the Mexican authorities had read the IOS report, they would probably never have presented her candidacy. Still, they have plenty of time to read the report and consider withdrawing Ms Ramos from the race to avoid a shameful situation in which she leads her country directly into a paradoxical situation in which the Mexican candidate for DG is charged with proven misconduct.  In the same vein, the role of the governing bodies is crucial.

 In the case of DG Azoulay's violation of the Constitution, Romania's Ambassador to UNESCO and President of UNESCO's General Conference proved too weak, too scared and too politically insignificant. She decided to keep quiet and do nothing (here  ).

Mrs. Miculescu took no diplomatic action in line with her current prerogatives, and left the matter in abeyance.  In the case of the IOS investigation against Gabriela Ramos and her candidacy for the position of DG, all eyes now turn to the Chairperson of the Executive Board, Vera El Khoury Lacoeuilhe, who will preside over the election of the next DG. It will be up to her either to at least partially restore the image of governance shattered by the Romanian Miculescu's inaction, or to disappointingly confirm that governance is a meaningless notion at UNESCO by doing nothing herself. We will have more on that. Watch this site.

This is where UNESCO stands today. We will have more on that. Watch this site.

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