The United Nations is a temple. Its system is a sanctuary of universal values that reflect what is most noble and that humanity should aspire for itself. It talks about peace, security, equity, respect, development, universal health and so many other values that would be enough to fill this column.
Taking seriously what the UN says is a rule. After all, it’s the UN. This goes for the World Health Organization (WHO), the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and so on. The list of acronyms is huge. Pretty huge.
But what is the reason to consider these organizations as something with such a heavenly reputation if in the end they are exactly a synthesis of the world with all its virtues, but, above all, with its defects, contradictions and vices?
This week, it was revealed that Ethiopian Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had to apologize to 51 women and girls who were victims of sexual harassment and even rape by WHO officials sent to the Democratic Republic of Congo with the aim to provide assistance to local authorities and victims amid an outbreak of Ebola recorded in that country.
An internal investigation found that complaints filed by the Swiss press were the visible tip of a deep problem that showed the abuse of WHO officials who used the power and, above all, the financial resources of the entity – which is also financed with the money of Brazilian taxpayers – to hire, blackmail and sexually abuse the people they are supposed to protect. The WHO report recognized that victims had to submit to the debauchery of at least 21 of its employees under the penalty of losing their jobs or not even being hired.
Adhanom said he only became aware of the abuses after the press denounced them. The cases were already known to the WHO, but they dragged there. Someone didn’t want to tarnish the institution’s image. According to the The New York Times newspaper, names of Unicef employees and NGOs subcontracted by multilateral agencies also emerged.
It’s not the first time that happens. In 1997, the Canadian Army prosecuted 47 soldiers who sexually abused nurses in Bosnia and even unconscious patients during the Civil War in that country. In 2016, members of the Blue Helmets – as members of the UN-coordinated peace forces are called – were accused of rape in the same Democratic Republic of Congo, by the way, where the WHO is now also facing the same charges.
In 2019, an academic study on the impact of UN peacekeeping missions revealed that in Haiti there was a shameful page for humanitarian missions. Cases of sexual abuse and the existence of hundreds of children born from these relationships, who were left with their mothers, in what is the most miserable country in the hemisphere, have been reported.
The study identified barbaric cases with those of eleven-year-old girls who were sexually abused by UN envoys. In addition to rapes, reports of grooming for small amounts or simply a little food were also collected.
But there is a fundamental difference between this case involving WHO and the three examples listed involving the Blue Helmets. In all of them, the complaints were external, almost always coming from human rights organizations. There is a hidden novelty in Adhanom’s statements that represents a watershed in the actions of employees of multilateral organizations.
Although the embryo of WHO’s investigations was also provoked by independent bodies, in this case the press, the WHO’s Director General went a step further. He revealed that the WHO itself forwarded to the countries of residence of the accused, the formal complaints of rape and other crimes associated with the abuses identified in the humanitarian mission.
In practice, Tedros Adhanom put an end to the discussion on the concept of privileges and immunity that has always clouded debates about abuses and crimes committed by civil servants and even entities in countries where they operate.
Since its postwar constitution, the entire multilateral system has rightly gained the protection of diplomatic immunity to ensure adequate protection for its actions and agents. This immunity was not always perfectly respected and many times UN officials, for example, were victims of abuse and violence. It is worth remembering the attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad that killed, among many others, the Brazilian Sérgio Vieira de Melo.
But immunities are also used to cover up evil. Or, it seems, were used.
Tedros Adhanom’s decision to denounce former WHO servants for rape sets a precedent – or even creates jurisprudence with global repercussions – by showing that there is no absolute immunity. In other words: the protection of organisms must be restricted to their existence and to the exercise of their activities, not for the crimes of those individuals who are sent on these missions.
It is never too much to remember: the UN and any other multilateral organization are a synthesis of what the world is all about. With its virtues, but all its faults and vices. There is an illusion of paradise.
The repercussions of Adhanom’s revelations could help human rights violations committed against more than 15,000 Cuban doctors who visited Brazil between 2013 and 2018. Under the formal intermediation of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the Cubans arrived in Brazil to participate in the “Program Mais Médicos” and during the years they served in Brazil, they were victims of a list of violations of their rights, two of which are denounced in US courts as slavery and human trafficking.
PAHO confiscated approximately 75% of doctors’ salaries and transferred them to the Cuban regime to “fulfill a contract” brokered by them to Cuba and Brazil.
In short, Brazil could never have hired Cuban doctors without submitting the process to Itamaraty and Congress, but Dilma Rousseff’s government found PAHO’s support to heat up the operation.
The Federal Court in Brasília came to judge and define the illegality of the confiscations of the agreement, of the transfers to PAHO and even the confiscations. The process, however, came to a halt before a hitherto insurmountable shield: immunity.
PAHO did not even feel obliged to adequately respond to the inquiries of the Federal Public Ministry and of Justice. In his defense he said diplomatically what I will summarize here in a more didactic way: “we owe you no satisfaction”.
The case sentence itself describes the problem. The crimes existed. There is a need to seek redress, but in the middle is immunity. Or there was.
The actions of Cuban doctors who are victims of slavery in Brazil put this into question. The use of a multilateral institution, financed with the contribution of the member states, to cover up crimes and not even be able to be questioned about such extrapolations of its functions.
PAHO uses money that should have been spent to help improve the health of Latin Americans to defend itself in court and continue to do mischief without having to be accountable to anyone.
The reports of the doctors who visited Brazil also include accusations of racism and sexual harassment by the project’s coordinators – all of them Cubans hired by PAHO to play the role of overseers on Brazilian soil.
The sad case of WHO victims in the Democratic Republic of Congo could be a chance for an end to abuses under the guise of immunity.
source https://pledgetimes.com/the-illusion-of-paradise-column-leonardo-coutinho/
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