In Caroline Hunt-Matthes (ed.), We the People: the UN Whistleblowers. Whistleblowing and Retaliation in the United Nations (Sparsnäs, Sweden: Irene Publishing, 2025), pp. 5-13
In December 2015, I received a long email from Caroline Hunt-Matthes. It was about whistleblowing, the United Nations and doing a PhD. Caroline said she’d known about my work on whistleblowing for several years. Recently, she had met my friend Jørgen Johansen, who had recommended me.
She wrote, “I am a whistleblower myself (United Nations) and client of GAP, now I am in my 12th year of litigation — the longest case in UN history.” GAP is the Government Accountability Project, the premier whistleblower-support organisation in the US.
Whistleblowers are people who speak out in the public interest. Typically, they are employees who report problems to their superiors, for example about corruption, abuse or dangers to the public. It might be about syphoning money from accounts, hiring less qualified applicants or selling dangerous products, or any of a host of other matters that are illegal, unethical or harmful. Some employees, in making reports, think they are just doing their jobs, and are shocked when they are treated badly as a consequence, and surprised that they are considered whistleblowers. Some make reports outside the organisation, to watchdog agencies like ombudsmen, and to the media.
Some people might be surprised to hear about problems experienced by whistleblowers in the United Nations. After all, isn’t the UN supposed to be the organisation that deals with world conflicts when governments cause the problems? Isn’t the UN supposed to be the solution?
Of course, there are many critics of the UN, both conservatives and progressives, and I was familiar with several critiques (Boutros-Ghali, 1999; Hazzard, 1990; Myrdal, 1976; Yeselson and Gaglione, 1974). But whistleblowing often has little connection with big-picture politics. It is about organisational power, including internal corruption. I knew the UN is an enormous bureaucracy, so it didn’t surprise me at all that attempts would be made to silence whistleblowers.
In decades of talking with and advising whistleblowers, I’ve encountered ones from all walks of life: teachers, police, public servants, company employees, military personnel, church members, researchers and others. The UN was just as likely to be hostile to whistleblowers as any other large hierarchical organisation. If working in the UN is a “higher calling,” it is no more so than working in religious organisations — and think of the difficulties faced by those who tried to expose paedophilia in churches.
Nearly every whistleblower I talk to tells about reprisals. Others who have talked with many whistleblowers report the same thing (e.g., Glazer and Glazer, 1989; Lennane, 2012), though it is important to note that not all whistleblowers experience retaliation (Miceli et al., 2008). In any case, speaking out is a risky business, and few workers have any idea about what they are about to experience. I have heard many stories of petty harassment, for example when routine requests are ignored and notifications of meetings are not received, or when assignments are changed to make work more difficult or unpleasant. Also quite common is ostracism, also known as the cold shoulder. Instead of saying hello, the boss turns away as if you’re not there, and co-workers are afraid to be seen in your company. This might seem trivial but is often the hardest thing to endure. Another common tactic is the spreading of rumours, about being difficult, doing your job poorly, being a heavy drinker or being abusive.
Then there are more direct attacks. Called in for a meeting with your superior, you receive a fierce dressing-down. You are criticised unfairly in a staff meeting. You are suspended from duty, demoted or transferred to a different position or location. You may be instructed to see a psychiatrist. This is humiliating, especially when colleagues know about it. These sorts of actions can have serious impacts on your performance and income and are damaging emotionally.
Finally, there is dismissal. Well, it may not be the end of the reprisals. Some whistleblowers are blacklisted: they find it impossible to get another job in their field. Some are sued or framed for crimes.
Some whistleblowers are fired immediately, so they aren’t subject to other sorts of reprisals. Most though, experience a range of adverse actions, which escalate if they continue to speak out. Outsiders have a difficult time appreciating the range and intensity of reprisals. It is also hard to appreciate the impact of reprisals, which affect whistleblowers’ income, health and relationships — and their sense that the world is just (Alford, 2001).
When whistleblowers contact me, I assume they have had a hard time, and this is right nearly every time. I was not surprised when Caroline told me about her own difficulties.
The one thing that surprised me about Caroline’s story was the duration of her whistleblowing story. I wrote back, “You tell an amazing story: 12 years in litigation. Your UN opponents want to wear you down, but you haven’t acquiesced.”
Caroline also wrote, “My own battle continues to pierce the veil of the myth of UN Ethics Office protection of UN whistle blowers. In a pioneering challenge via judicial review of the ethics office practice in my own case I succeeded in 2013 via the United Nations Administrative tribunal to verify the UN ethics office’s unethical practice.”
The UN, like many other large organisations, has set up formal processes to deal with disclosures from employees. The idea of a protected disclosure is that a worker can reveal information or concerns about corruption, abuse, dangers to the public or other wrongdoing, and not suffer any adverse consequences. Caroline was saying that the UN processes for whistleblower protection, via its ethics office, were a sham by design, with such strict requirements that few whistleblowers would qualify for protection. In essence, the office was itself unethical in the way it interpreted its own policy.
This was not a surprise to me. It was just what I had been hearing from whistleblowers for decades. As an office-bearer in Whistleblowers Australia — a voluntary whistleblower-support group — since the 1990s, I often receive phone calls and emails. Callers start by telling me about their experiences: seeing a problem at work, telling the boss, suffering reprisals and then — here is the cruncher — appealing to authorities for help. They go to the boss’s boss, the human resources unit or the board of management. Or they go outside the organisation, to an ombudsman, auditor-general, anti-corruption commission, politician or the courts — or to several of these, because they were let down time after time.
I wrote back to Caroline: “You say UNAT overturns 95% of UNDT staff wins.” Deciphered, this means that when a UN staff member won in the Dispute Tribunal, the Appeals Tribunal nearly always overturned the ruling. I continued: “This reminds me of US appeal courts ruling for employers in almost all cases, in direct contradiction to what Congress wanted when passing whistleblower laws. Tom Devine has written about this, as you may know; the UN follows the same pattern.” Devine was the long-time director of GAP, the US Government Accountability Project, already mentioned. See Devine (2004: 85).
I knew that most of the staff in ombudsmen’s offices, and other places where whistleblowers went for assistance, were well-intentioned, but they were hamstrung by regulations and were totally overloaded. Even with the will, they usually couldn’t help, and that was what research showed too (De Maria, 1999). When I came to write my book offering advice to whistleblowers (Martin, 2013), one chapter, titled “Official channels,” was a cautionary account of why it’s usually unwise to rely on any authority to provide protection against reprisals, much less address the original problem. Later I even wrote a book on this, also titled Official Channels (Martin, 2020).
Why would the UN be any different? It was a bureaucracy built on bureaucracies, tasked with dealing with serious problems — including wars and human rights violations — where vested interests and conflicts of interest abound. Caroline summed it up: “The bottom line and bizarre paradox is that currently the UN is not a safe environment for UN staff members to blow the whistle which is a mandatory requirement for a UN staff member encountering misconduct.”
Given all this, is there any need to expose whistleblower problems in the UN? Well, of course. Most people have no experience with whistleblowing and don’t personally know any whistleblowers. More importantly, most people, including some of those working for the UN, believe the system works. They believe that if there’s a problem, there must be some authority or process to address it, and surely the UN, with its unparalleled responsibilities and as a paragon of procedural justice, must be ideally placed to address problems.
That is why this book is so important. The UN is just like any other large organisation, and has the same sorts of problems. It is a seething mess of ambition, power plays and grievances of its member states along with commitment and dedication to human welfare. Often, the dedicated ones pay the penalty.
How can we understand whistleblowing, in particular the incredibly hostile attitudes towards insiders who speak out? There are many perspectives on this, including legal, psychological, organisational, communicative and political perspectives. Here I’ll outline just a few, the ones that seem to me to offer the most useful insight.
Deena Weinstein, a sociologist, developed the idea that bureaucracies are similar to authoritarian states (Weinstein, 1979). “Bureaucracy” here doesn’t refer to specific organisations, for example in government, but to a way of organising work. The key characteristics of bureaucracy are hierarchy and a division of labour, in which workers are interchangeable cogs. It’s also common for there to be rules of behaviour and for relationships to be impersonal. With this sort of definition, lots of large organisations are bureaucracies, including government departments, militaries, corporations, churches and trade unions.
When Weinstein said bureaucracies are similar to authoritarian states, she was thinking of several features. There are no elections: leaders are not chosen by the workers. Opposition movements or parties, ones with the capacity to take power, are forbidden. There is little or no free speech. Civil liberties that exist in the public sphere simply do not apply while working in a bureaucracy. There is one important difference. The rulers of states can back up their power by using the police and military. In most bureaucratic organisations, there are no armed forces.
With this picture, whistleblowers are analogous to dissidents in repressive regimes. They speak out, but even this mere act is a threat to those at the top. In a regime, dissidents might be arrested, imprisoned, even killed. This occasionally happens to whistleblowers, but the more common responses are ostracism, harassment, reprimands, demotion, referral to psychiatrists, threats and dismissal.
The UN is a giant, complex bureaucracy. In structure, it is analogous to authoritarian regimes, not to liberal democracies, much less participatory democracies. So, according to Weinstein’s analysis, it is no surprise that UN whistleblowers encounter difficulties. The only surprise would be if they didn’t.
What about the behaviour of co-workers, those who might be called bystanders to a whistleblower drama? Why don’t co-workers join with the whistleblower and form an opposition movement? This happens so rarely that something must be happening to prevent it. For insights, it’s useful to turn to a book titled Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers. The author, Robert Jackall (1989), gained access to two US corporations, plus a public relations company. Rather like an anthropologist studying an alien culture, he observed managerial behaviour up close. Amazingly, this sort of research is extremely rare. Most top managers do not want to allow researchers into their organisations.
Jackall observed how corporate managers negotiated their day-to-day activities, which was their reality. It is one of amazing conformity, in dress, behaviour and thinking. Managers do not get ahead by pretending: they have to believe in what they are doing. However, this isn’t easy, because corporations are in constant turmoil, so managers need to adapt to the situation. Their cardinal rule is to be attentive to what their bosses want, indeed to figure out, without being told, what their bosses want before the bosses know it. In doing this, they also seek to avoid responsibility, and have ready a set of justifications for their actions or nonactions that can be adapted to the circumstances. In all this, truth is irrelevant: right and wrong are decided by superiors.
In this sort of bureaucratic world, whistleblowers don’t fit in. They introduce an external, inflexible morality that clashes with the adaptable beliefs required to survive and get ahead. Jackall described several ways that managers thought about whistleblowers, ways that enabled their own continued role. For example, they said that the concerns raised by whistleblowers were no big deal, that there are ways to justify not acting, and that an external moral code had no relevance. Jackall:
"Bureaucracy transforms all moral issues into immediately practical concerns. A moral judgment based on a professional ethic makes little sense in a world where the etiquette of authority relationships and the necessity of protecting and covering for one’s boss, one’s network, and oneself supersede all other considerations and where nonaccountability for action is the norm." (p. 111).
What Jackall saw at a few US corporations may or may not apply to other bureaucratic organisations in various parts of the world. Still, Jackall’s study is the only one I’ve come across that gives a detailed analysis of the way managers think about whistleblowers and thereby helps to explain why so many who know about wrongdoing do nothing about it but instead come up with reasons for their inaction.
In 1980, a book was published titled Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion. The author, Melvin Lerner (1980), presented data on the way people understand the world. Many, though far from all, believe that fairness always wins in the end, the way the good guys in Hollywood movies always triumph. For these people, it is disturbing to imagine that wrongdoers can succeed and good people be irreparably harmed. To maintain their belief that the world is just, they blame the victim. When someone loses their job and ends up in poverty, it’s their fault. Poverty is due to laziness, to lack of motivation. Victims of crime must have done something wrong. (See also Montada and Lerner (1998) and Ross and Miller (2002).)
For those who believe the world is just, typical whistleblower stories are a threat, because the person who does the right thing is usually the only one who pays a penalty, while wrongdoers get away with their deeds. The way to resolve this psychological problem is to believe that the whistleblower has done the wrong thing. “Reprisals” are actually proper treatment. It simply couldn’t be that top managers are committing crimes, that others know about it but are saying nothing, and that everyone is getting away with it. It couldn’t be, so the whistleblowers must be wrong.
Belief in a just world helps explain why there is so much more attention to whistleblowers compared to what they have blown the whistle about. There are a great many stories about Chelsea Manning and her travails, and not so many on the actions by US troops and government officials that she exposed. Likewise with Edward Snowden and his revelations about surveillance by the US National Security Agency. This obsessive focus reaches a peak with the attention given to Julian Assange, who is not a whistleblower but rather a publisher of whistleblower revelations, including Manning’s. Why is Assange and his foibles so often the story rather than WikiLeaks? Plausibly, one factor is a belief in a just world. For those hostile to Assange, the leaks revealing unaddressed corruption in valued institutions are conveniently forgotten. For those supportive of Assange, his treatment is outrageous precisely because it is perceived as the epitome of injustice. For those with a deep-seated belief that the world is just, it is less distressing to ignore whistleblower stories or to think the worst of whistleblowers.
When someone commits murder and tries to get away with it, they usually try to hide what they’ve done. If the evidence of their act is overwhelming, they may try to explain it away as self-defence, blaming the victim. This can be understood as the perpetrator trying to reduce public outrage over their action.
Now imagine a powerful group — a corporation, a government, a military — that is responsible for murder or some other crime, for example state-sponsored torture (Brooks, 2016). To reduce public outrage, there are more options. Cover-up is one, just as for the individual murderer: torture is nearly always carried out in secret. Another technique is devaluing the victims, for example calling them terrorists, subversives or criminals. There are also reinterpretation techniques, including lying about methods used, saying they’re not so bad, blaming subordinates and saying the methods were needed to obtain vital information. If evidence of torture is overwhelming — think of the photos of the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib — the perpetrator, the US government and military, may set up investigations or run trials that target low-level figures. Finally, there is the technique of intimidation, used against those who expose the torture. All of these techniques were used in relation to torture at Abu Ghraib, including always referring to “abuse” rather than “torture” (Gray and Martin, 2007).
These same techniques for reducing public outrage over injustice are found in numerous domains, from sexual harassment to genocide (Martin, 2007). And they are routinely found in whistleblower stories. Usually, the wrongdoing is covered up, just like the torture at Abu Ghraib. That is why whistleblowing is a threat: it exposes the wrongdoing. Then there is devaluation of the target: reprisals against whistleblowers routinely include derogatory rumours such as about poor performance, sexual liaisons, drunkenness and mental illness, and often there are degradation rituals, such as denunciations and referrals to psychiatrists. Reinterpretation techniques include lying about what perpetrators have done, saying they are no big deal and blaming others. Then there are official channels, which I’ve already described, which give the appearance of providing justice but which are more commonly illusions. The remaining tactic is intimidation, exemplified in the reprisals against whistleblowers.
These tactics are especially visible in high-profile cases like those of Edward Snowden (Martin, 2015) but are also observed in most other whistleblower stories, including the following chapters. Indeed, so common is the standard whistleblower trajectory that it is often possible to predict what tactics will be used by perpetrators, and to plan on using counter-tactics.
Chapters 2 to 7 are whistleblower stories, told in seemingly gory detail, though the reality for each author was, if anything, more tortuous and horrific. In contrast, Edward Flaherty’s chapter gives a lawyer’s perspective on how the immunity of the UN to national laws affects whistleblowers.
You can read each whistleblower chapter as a personal saga that reveals something about the UN. If you want, you can also think of the frameworks introduced here. Using Deena Weinstein’s idea that bureaucracies are similar to authoritarian states, you can think of analogies between the treatment of UN whistleblowers and dissidents in today’s China, Russia or Saudi Arabia. Using Robert Jackall’s analysis of managers in corporations, you can note any mentions of how most UN workers adapt to the power structure. Using the idea of belief in a just world, you can note your own feelings, including disgust at the treatment of those trying to do the right thing or perhaps annoyance at the mistakes they made. Using the backfire framework, you can take note of the methods used by perpetrators and their allies, both in wrongdoing and in taking reprisals against whistleblowers, and whether the whistleblowers used any counter-methods.
For me, the stories of UN whistleblowers provide a cautionary tale about ideas of world government. Ever since the founding of the UN, and long before, some visionaries have looked to world government as a solution to wars, genocide and repression generated by the system of states, a system driven by national interests and lacking any overarching controls. Just as rulers of states have police and militaries to maintain order and defend against enemies, surely a benevolent world government can bring peace on earth. But there’s a problem: what if the power of world government is used against the interests of the world’s population? Does the treatment of UN whistleblowers foreshadow the fate of dissent in a world government that would have vastly more power than today’s often feeble UN?
These are gloomy thoughts. Learning more about whistleblower stories can indeed be depressing, but also illuminating about the dynamics of large organisations. Without whistleblowers, we might have little idea about how organisations operate, and how oppressive they can be. Whistleblower stories provide an opportunity to understand the exercise of power, to learn from it and to pursue alternatives.
When Caroline Hunt-Matthes first wrote to me in 2015, she had already been on a long whistleblowing journey. She had also started a different journey, a plan to bring together a collection of UN whistleblower stories, to alert the world to dysfunctions that undermine worthwhile UN programmes and harm large numbers of people. This journey has also been quite long. In the pages of this book, it enters a new stage.
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Brooks, A. (2016) The Annihilation of Memory and Silent Suffering: Inhibiting Outrage at the Injustice of Torture in the War on Terror in Australia, PhD Thesis, University of Wollongong, http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/4865/.
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