UN's Annan in new scandal after clearing sex harassment official 

October 29, 2005
UK Yahoo News/AFP
Original Source: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/041029/323/f5jq0.html
UNITED NATIONS (AFP) - UN Secretary General Kofi Annan 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 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. 

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. 

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 evidence and he made his decision, Eckhard said. 
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. 

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. 
OIOS submitted a report to the secretary general supporting the allegations and recommended that appropriate actions be taken accordingly, it said, noting Annan had decided the allegations could not be substantiated by the evidence and closed the matter. 

In July, Annan sent UNHCR staff a letter saying he had informed Lubbers of his duty to defend the right of staff members, such as the woman who made the claim, to be allowed to raise any kind of complaint, after it emerged that Lubbers had pressed the woman to drop her complaint. 
Lubbers has denied having sexually harassed the woman. 

In an ironic twist, the news about Lubbers broke as the UN Security Council was discussing a report from Annan that denounced the world's collective failure to prevent violence against women. 

The UN chief has tried to keep the lid on a number of scandals that have erupted over the past year. Earlier this month, he blamed a campaign against the United Nations for having damaged the world body's image. 

Investigators are probing allegations that UN officials had been paid off by Saddam Hussein's regime while the United Nations supervised Iraq's oil sales between 1996 and 2003. 

And, earlier this year, UN officials admitted they had been holding a black box from an airplane in a locked file cabinet for a decade -- two days after ridiculing the idea, which had been reported in a French newspaper. 

The report said the flight recorder may have come from the plane crash that killed Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana, setting off the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, which occurred when Annan was in charge of UN peacekeepers who were on the ground but did not prevent the slaughter. 
The black box was found in a UN peacekeeping office. The United Nations said an investigation had determined that the flight device had not come from the plane in question. 

The 54-page OIOS report outlined other instances of wrongdoing, including the fact that a UN staffer had embezzled millions of dollars in Kosovo that it said were subsequently recovered. 
It also said investigators were looking into allegations of sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.