UN staff ‘responsible for 60,000 rapes in a decade’ : Former official

United Nations staff have carried out thousands of rapes around the world, a former senior official has claimed.

Andrew MacLeod, a former chief of operations at the UN’s Emergency Co-ordination Centre, said that “predatory” abusers used development jobs to get to vulnerable women and children.

He estimated that 60,000 rapes had been carried out by UN staff in the past decade, with 3,300 paedophiles working in the organisation and its agencies.

“There are tens of thousands of aid workers around the world with paedophile tendencies, but if you wear a Unicef T-shirt nobody will ask what you’re up to,” he toldThe Sun.

“You have the impunity to do whatever you want. It is endemic across the aid industry across the world. The system is at fault, and should have stopped this years ago.”

He had arrived at his numbers by estimating that only one in ten rapes and assaults by UN staff was reported. The UN has faced greater scrutiny over sexual exploitation by its staff in recent years. In a report published by Antonio Guterres, the secretary-general, last year, the body said that 103 allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse by UN staff were made in 2016; 52 of them against the peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic. Nearly half of the allegations involved “one or more children”. The UN deploys 100,000 uniformed military and police professionals and 95,000 civilians around the world. Mr Guterres, a former Portuguese prime minister, said the UN had “wrestled for many years with the issue of sexual exploitation and abuse”.

The former Tory leader Lord Hague of Richmond and the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, urged British ministers not to rush to cut the aid budget in response to the Oxfam scandal. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Lord Hague said that there was an “overwhelming strategic, as well as moral, imperative to deliver aid to the world’s poorest people”, but that the sector now needed to meet higher standards. Mr Corbyn, a regular Oxfam donor, said the charity’s conduct in Haiti was disgraceful but added: “It’s not a reason to cut the budget, it’s a reason to manage it carefully.”

Source : The Australian