Readers, the UN agency that basically tells the US State Department what to do and which refugees to bring to your towns is the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The present head honcho at UNHCR is socialist Antonio Guterres. We just mentioned him in our previous post this morning, here.
This is an incredible story about whistleblower, Caroline Hunt-Matthes, from the Government Accountability Project (emphasis mine):
After nine years of legal battles, a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) whistleblower has won her case. On May 28, 2013, the United Nations Dispute Tribunal (UNDT) – the court of first instance of the two-tier internal justice system through which UN employees contest violations of their rights – issued two judgments that found in favor of Caroline Hunt-Matthes, a former senior investigation officer with UNHCR’s Inspector General’s Office (IGO).
According to judgment 2013/85, Hunt-Matthes made numerous disclosures regarding UNHCR practices. These included, but were not limited to, disclosures about interference/obstruction into an investigation of an alleged rape of a UN staff member in Sri Lanka by another staff member; the decision of the IGO to hire a staff member who was himself under investigation by the IGO; the “failure to register a sexual harassment complaint” against the High Commissioner; the “unlawful detention of refugees by senior UNHCR staff, leading to the death of a refugee while in detention;” and a “report of sexual exploitation of a refugee by a UNHCR staff member.” (para. 34) In April 2006, Hunt-Matthes filed a request for protection with the UN Ethics Office, which is charged with reviewing retaliation complaints from whistleblowers. In December 2006, the Ethics Office issued a decision in which it found that she engaged in protected activity but concluded that there was no prima facie case of retaliation because there was allegedly no connection between the retaliation and her whistleblowing.
Read it all to see the far-reaching vindication of Hunt-Matthes and confirmation that she was retaliated against for blowing the whistle on the agency.
I’m reminded of UNHCR audit
For new readers, in 2012, the UNHCR came under fire for misusing millions of your tax dollars, here.
This is what FoxNews reported at the time:
EXCLUSIVE: The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, two years ago was sitting on a stockpile of $437 million in unspent cash, even as a U.N. auditing agency warned that its sloppy handling of funds imperiled future contributions from U.N. member nations.
The report, issued last year but only introduced for member-state review in the U.N. General Assembly, cites UNHCR for sloppy bookkeeping, poor financial oversight, managerial disarray, and a lack of tools to judge how well it was doing its job of helping tens of millions of the world’s displaced people.
The U.N.’s independent Board of Auditors used remarkably straight-forward language to lambaste the refugee agency, whose largest donor, the United States, contributed $712 million to UNHCR in 2010, according to the State Department. The auditors noted that the relief agency, which is financed largely by voluntary contributions, spent about $1.9 billion in 2010; its budget two years earlier was about $1.1 billion.
The auditors pointed out that there were “strong indicators of significant shortcomings in financial management” at the agency, headed since 2005 by Antonio Guterres, a former Socialist prime minister of Portugal. “This is a major risk for UNHCR,” the auditors warned, “given the increasing pressures on donors to justify why they provide public funds to international aid organizations.”
I don’t know if anything ever came of this revelation. But, to think that this agency has anything to do with the demographic make-up and economic situation of your American city is maddening.