From Geneva to New York: Official Complaint with SG Guterres

Hillel Neuer flew to the United Nations headquarters in New York to file an official complaint with Secretary-General Guterres on behalf of UN Watch. The complaint is based on recently acquired evidence, including a full testimony from Emma Reilly, a UN Whistleblower, showcasing Tistounet’s systematic discrimination against UN Watch throughout a period of 15 years.

The testimony by Tistounet’s former colleague, Ms. Reilly, detailed how he commanded his staff at the UNHRC secretariat to violate UN rules in order to surreptitiously cancel or demote the legitimate participation of UN Watch in Human Rights Council debates, and how he obsessively denigrated and demonized UN Watch, creating a culture of abuse, harassment and discrimination against the NGO’s personnel inside the Council.

UN Watch had previously suspected Tistounet’s fraudulence after leaked emails, from concerned colleagues of his, showed how he instructed his UNHRC staff to go to an Internet café outside the UN to secretly post material about a 2007 incident where Mr. Neuer was briefly arrested in the U.S. in a case of mistaken identity. This was a clear attempt to humiliate him publicly. Tistounet instructed his staff to violate their own UN procedures to comply with any false Interpol arrest warrant that might be filed against Mr. Neuer, in order to block his entry to UN premises in Geneva and thereby prevent Mr. Neuer from testifying before the Human Rights Council plenary.

Mr. Neuer writes in the official complaint to the Secretary-General, ‘Excellency, for the reasons detailed in the Complaint, we respectfully urge you to launch an independent and external investigation; to immediately suspend Mr. Tistounet from his functions for the duration of the investigation; and to take immediate remedial action to ensure that UN Watch may once again exercise its right to speak at the UN Human Rights Council on an equal basis with all other NGOs.’

Understandably, there is a desperate need for genuine independence and externality in any investigation that might go ahead. UN Watch have little reason to put their faith in an investigatory system that has time and again provided impunity to UN officials, through a self-selecting process that could yet again see the UN perpetuate prejudices through the tied-hands of inexperienced staff members.

As such, Mr. Neuer has sensibly requested ‘that the Secretary General and UN Watch mutually agree on the selection of an independent expert or entity to conduct the investigation’ where ‘said expert or entity should have full and unimpeded access to all UN email exchanges and information concerning NGO liaison generally, and UN Watch and its director in particular.’