The UN is a bruised and battered organisation, damaged by a succession of scandals. In a speech in New York, Kallas referred specifically to the misuse of Iraq’s oil-for-food programme and sexual exploitation by peacekeepers. Kallas might also have mentioned, but did not, the allegations of sexual harassment that forced the resignation of Ruud Lubbers as head of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.
Those much-disputed allegations (and the way they were handled) called into question the UN administration’s ability to police itself. The office of internal oversight produced a report that found Lubbers guilty. The UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan found him not guilty. Lubbers stayed on, but then resigned when the report surfaced a year later.
In the meantime, the office of the secretary-general was weakened by the oil-for-food allegations. Paul Volcker, the former head of the US Federal Reserve Board, chaired a committee that was asked to investigate the allegations. He found massive diversion of funds, profiteering by private companies and national administrations and, for good measure, the involvement of Annan’s son, Kojo. In passing, the Volcker reports damned the UN administration’s lack of internal controls.
In the wake of those Volcker reports, faced with fierce criticism from the US (whose representative to the United Nations, John Bolton, embodies the Bush administration’s suspicion of the UN), Annan launched in March a programme of reforms that encompass staff policy, reporting lines, governance and accounting procedures.
So far, so faintly familiar – for those who lived through the fall of the Commission of Jacques Santer, when a succession of scandals undermined public and political confidence in the administration.
What finally triggered the resignation of the Santer Commission was a report to the European Parliament from a committee of independent experts (the EU version of the Volcker commission). One of those experts, Inga-Britt Ahlenius, was last summer appointed head of the UN’s office of internal oversight services, charged with restoring the credibility of that much discredited office. She was one of those who met the Commission’s visiting delegation last week, which in addition to Kallas included Claude Chene, the head of the Commission’s reform taskforce and director-general for administration, and Walter Deffaa, the Commission’s internal auditor.
In a joint communiqué published after their meeting, the two sides noted that: “The European Commission accomplished a major internal reform of its administration between 1999 and 2005 and gained valuable technical experience in this regard. Many of the topics raised in the current discussion about improving United Nations budgetary, financial and human resource policies are similar to those that were – and continue to be – of particular importance to the European Commission.”
Now some might baulk at the idea of the Commission giving lessons to anyone about how to improve public administration. A bit premature, one might think, given that the Commission has yet to win the unqualified approval of its external auditor for the EU accounts, the modernisation of the accounting system is still under construction and the anti-fraud office OLAF is still being reformed.
To be fair, Kallas does not claim that reform of the Commission is complete and the lessons he offered the UN were only interim conclusions.
And from the UN’s perspective one can see that even the experience of a still-imperfect Commission is better than nothing. There are just not that many multinational, public administrations that combine politicians and civil servants with which the UN can compare notes.
The Commission is right not to withhold its advice because, viewed from Brussels, the UN desperately needs reform. Indeed, Kallas and his colleagues Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the external relations commissioner, and Louis Michel, the development commissioner, are in some respects at the mercy of the UN. If another scandal like the oil-for-food debacle were to hit the UN again and was shown to involve EU money, what then would be the Commission’s defence? That it did not know that the internal controls of the UN were inadequate? That it trusted the UN to administer EU citizens’ money correctly? These would be shaky arguments after the Volcker reports. The Commission’s own external auditor, the European Court of Auditors, has already complained about its restricted access to UN-managed projects that receive EU funding.
There is an interesting trend developing for the EU to develop its capacity for certain actions that in earlier times it would have left to other international institutions. Michel Barnier’s proposals for a civil protection force, published earlier this month, might be a case in point. The European Investment Bank’s decision to lend money for infrastructure projects in Africa certainly is. The independent action is attractive, not least because it raises the EU’s profile – the buzzword is “visibility”. Giving all the credit for humanitarian or development aid to the UN or the World Bank will not win the EU any referenda on the constitution (for example). At the very least, a few independent actions give the EU some leverage over the UN and the World Bank to set the terms on which its money is used.
That said, the EU does not have the option of living without the UN and its attendant agencies. The EU simply does not have the staff or the resources to take on all the tasks that UN agencies carry out, which means the EU cannot afford for the UN to fail: the EU must help nurse the UN back to strength or suffer the consequences.