Israel/Palestine

UN rape scandal whistle-blower resigns
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Anders Kompass has left his post at the UN, insisting he cannot work for an organisation that has a lack of accountability towards sexual abuse.

Anders Kompass, director of field operations at the UN human rights office in Geneva, announced his resignation on Tuesday. Kompass was suspended last year for exposing the sexual abuse of children in the Central African Republic. Kompass says he can no longer work for an organisation that does not hold senior officials to account.

Kompass faced the sack after he shared confidential documents detailing the exploitation of children as young as eight by French troops in the M’Poko camp for displaced people in the Central African Republic. The information was given to authorities in Paris because of the UN’s failure to stop the abuse. When French authorities’ tried to investigate Kompass’s claims, their efforts were hampered by UN officials.

The UN repeatedly condemned his actions, contending that he had breached protocols by sharing a secret internal document.Kompass was under disciplinary investigation for nine months. In January this year he was exonerated and informed in a letter that the internal investigation; run by the Office of Internal Oversight, had cleared him of all charges.

An independent panel later found senior UN managers to have “abused their authority” in the handling of the scandal and summed up the situation as a “gross institutional failure”. The UN’s actions were condemned by the panel as disingenuous to label what Kompass did as “misconduct”. In another separate case concerning Kompass passing information to the Moroccan government, his peers allegedly branded the whistle-blower as an “untrustworthy shill for foreign government.”

Kompass told news agency IRIN: “The complete impunity for those who have been found to have, in various degrees, abused their authority, together with the unwillingness of the hierarchy to express any regrets for the way they acted towards me sadly confirms that lack of accountability is entrenched in the United Nations. This makes it impossible for me to continue working there.”