The UN Preaches

For John, BLUF:  Hypocrites at Turtle Bay.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

---

Over at The Instapundit is a link to a Wall Street Journal article by Ms Claudia Rosett, and this extract of the key point.♠

That’s rich coming from the U.N., which has still not solved its own festering problems of peacekeeper sex abuse, including the rape of minors.  Exposing abusers and holding them to account is a great idea.  The Vatican has spent years addressing the scandal of its own past handling of such cases.  But the U.N. hardly engages in the transparency it is now promoting.

The U.N. releases only generic statistics on violations committed by personnel working under its flag.  The U.N. doesn’t share with the public such basic information as the names of the accused or the details of what they did to people the U.N. dispatched them to protect.  Blue berets accused of sex crimes are simply sent back to their home countries, where in the majority of cases they drop off the radar.

Though the U.N. has been recording a drop in sex-abuse cases since it began releasing numbers in 2007, the number of alleged instances of rape and exploitation each year still runs into the dozens.  (This may understate the realities, given the hurdles to victims coming forward, often in societies in tumult or at war.)  From 2007-13, the U.N. reported more than 600 allegations of rape or sexual exploitation, with 354 substantiated—many of them involving minors. The numbers do not convey how ugly some of these cases get.  Details can occasionally be gleaned when an incident seeps past the U.N. wall of omerta and makes it into the news, as with the peacekeeper gang rape in 2011 of a Haitian teenager, whose agony was caught on video.

As Professor Reynolds says, "If it weren’t for double standards, the U.N. would have no standards at all."

Or, as Saint Matthew says (7:4):

Or how sayest thou to thy brother:  Let me cast the mote out of thy eye; and behold a beam is in thy own eye?

Hat tip to the Instapundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  This is about the United Nations trying to take the Vatican to the woodshed over child abuse.