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| UN's Annan in new scandal after clearing sex harassment official |
| 2004-10-29 |
| posting for Mikey S - EFL UNITED NATIONS (AFP) - UN Secretary General Kofi Annan (news - web sites) was embroiled in a new scandal after it emerged that he cleared a top official of sexual harassment despite an internal enquiry which backed the victim's claims. Annan cleared Ruud Lubbers remember this asshat? in July after a woman on his staff claimed she had been groped by the ageing former Dutch prime minister, who has been the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva since 2001. true to form...females are for UN needs However, red-faced UN officials admitted on Thursday that an investigation by the watchdog Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) had backed the unnamed woman's allegations in a report to Annan. I'm shocked! shocked! The UN chief, rocked this year by other scandals involving allegations of fraud in Iraqi oil sales and the bizarre discovery of a missing airplane black box locked in a file cabinet, then decided to pardon Lubbers. "The secretary general has the right to accept or reject such recommendations," spokesman Fred Eckhard said at a testy press conference at UN headquarters in New York. "The secretary general reviewed the He said Annan had consulted lawyers and concluded that the case against the 65-year-old Lubbers outlined in the OIOS enquiry report, which was never released to the public, was "unsustainable." Pressed to explain what that meant, a visibly irritated Eckhard replied: "Legal basis, legal basis, legal basis." Shades of AlGore's "No Controlling Authority" Eckhard said that a "technical error" had accounted for the release of an early draft of a separate, wide-ranging OIOS report into UN wrongdoing that made no mention of the findings of the Lubbers enquiry. However, the United Nations released a correction that made clear that the oversight office had backed up the woman's claims. The damning paragraph said the female staffer had complained of having been sexually harassed by Lubbers and later, in "related" incidents, had been harassed by a senior manager of his staff. |
| Posted by:Frank G |