The United Nations, which has what the New York Post called a “long, sordid tale of corrupt” leadership,” has a plant to eliminate graft by 2030, not just within the U.N. but worldwide, reports Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
The U.N. headlines a report on its website “Graft will no longer exist in world transformed by 2030 Agenda, says secretary-general at anti-corruption excellence awards.”
The report includes Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s remarks at the Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani Anti-Corruption Excellence Awards in Vienna.
Ban talked about the U.N.’s “Sustainable Development Goals,” the “rule of law” the world body’s Doha Declaration adopted by the 13th Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice.
“Corruption is a strangling root that reaches deep into all our societies. It chokes hopes and frustrates opportunities for all the people. It enables the few to prosper at the expense of millions who are left behind. No country is immune,” he said.
“Every day, around the world, the weakest and most vulnerable members of society are losing out: in education, in health and in justice. Corruption is arguably one of the world’s biggest drivers of inequity and inequality. It increases poverty and suffering by diverting invaluable funds. It is crippling to economic and social development,” he said.
“We must not allow the corrosive acid of corruption to eat into public life and hinder our efforts to lift billions from poverty and towards a better world. We have set ourselves a goal, within the span of a single generation, to transform the world through the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In that world, corruption will no longer exist. There will be equality and justice for all people, especially women and girls.”
But the Post, only last year, cited a long list of corruption allegations involving leaders at the highest levels of the U.N.
The op-ed noted the charges of “bribery-related tax evasion against a former officer, John Ashe of Antigua and Barbuda”; the former GA president Miguel d’Escoto, who “tried to use the presidency to convert the General Assembly into an anti-imperialist funhouse”; “Serbia’s Vuk Jeremiććc, who in 2012 tried to whitewash his nation’s role in the Balkan wars a decade earlier”; Qatar’s Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nas-ser, who “got the position in 2011, shortly after the corrupt soccer-ruling body, FIFA, awarded Qatar the right to host the 2022 World Cup” and others.
A decade ago, Claudia Rosett wrote in a commentary that the “Oil-for-Food” relief program was mired in “wholesale corruption.”
“We still do not know the full extent of these debacles – the more sensational ones include the disappearance of U.N. funds earmarked for tsunami relief in Indonesia and the exposure of a transnational network of pedophiliac rape by U.N. peacekeepers in Africa – and we may never know. What we do know is that an assortment of noble-sound efforts has devolved into enterprises marked chiefly by abuse, self-dealing, and worse.”
The New York Times reported that even former U.N. official Anthony Banbury, who worked as a human rights officer in Haiti, in Yugoslavia during the Srebrenica genocide and in South Asia after the tsunami, said “colossal mismanagement” is causing the institution to fail.
“If you locked a team of evil geniuses in a laboratory, they could not design a bureaucracy so maddeningly complex, requiring so much effort but in the end incapable of delivering the intended result. The system is a black hole into which disappear countless tax dollars and human aspirations, never to be seen again.”
For the rest of this report, and more, please go to Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
