Proposed U.N. Shield for Whistle - Blowers Stalls 
Reuters
October 18, 2005
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-un-whistleblowers.html

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United Nations has yet to take steps to protect staffers who accuse superiors of misconduct, nearly 18 months after Secretary-General Kofi Annan promised to shield such whistle-blowers from reprisals, U.N. officials acknowledged on Tuesday.
Annan, in a June 4, 2004, letter to U.N. staff, said the world body's internal watchdog office had found through a survey that U.N. employees believed that little was being done to root out unethical behavior and that workers who exposed wrongdoing risked reprisals.
``We will ... develop measures to reinforce formal protection for whistle-blowers,'' Annan said at that time. ``I want to stress that I am fully committed to addressing the concerns that all of you have identified in this survey.''
Almost a year and a half later, however, new draft rules on whistle-blowers remain on the desk of Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette, said Barbara Dixon, who heads the watchdog unit's Investigations Division.
``We had anticipated when we were working on that document that what was going to happen was there was going to be a final policy on whistle-blowers. There is not one yet,'' Dixon told a news conference.
Tarred by a steady drumbeat of accusations against various U.N. officials in recent months, many of them linked to the now-defunct $64 billion oil-for-food program for Iraq, the United Nations circulated a proposed new whistle-blower policy for comment in April as part of a broader U.N. reform initiative.
When Annan said in the 2004 letter that employees should not be afraid to disclose unethical behavior, ``he was setting the tone for what was going to come later,'' Dixon said. ``Going through and setting up a program takes some period of time. I would hope it would happen sooner rather than later.''
A number of management reforms were adopted last month at a U.N. summit. But the whistle-blower rules were not included.
The main U.N. bureaucracy has nearly 15,000 employees worldwide and a $1.8 billion annual budget. That does not include more than $3.5 billion for peacekeeping forces and 20,000 staffers who work in U.N. programs and funds.
The whistle-blower proposal would create an ethics unit in Annan's executive office to hear reports of reprisals or threats against staff reporting mismanagement or wrongdoing, and to discipline those found responsible.
The unit would report annually to the U.N. General Assembly on all the cases it handled and the actions it took. A new whistle-blower review panel would watch over the ethics unit and suggest improvements.