Whistleblower Reveals Far Reaching CCP Influence in UN: Emma Reilly
- EPOCHTV
- 1 day ago
- 25 min read
Emma Reilly worked as a human rights lawyer at the United Nations. She discovered that for years, the Human Rights Council had been handing over the names of Chinese dissidents slated to attend the U.N. to the Chinese regime. Included were the names of U.S., Canadian, and European citizens.
“The CCP demands get listened to because the U.N. takes them seriously, whereas they believe that the money from the U.S. will always flow, no matter what the law says in Congress, and that’s a problem,” Reilly says. “You see the way that individuals who are willing to prioritize China’s influence and China’s comfort over their own mandate managed to rise and rise in the U.N., whereas people that object get fired.”
After speaking out and informing the United States of what she says was a “criminal” practice at the U.N., she lost her whistleblower protection status and was fired.
Watch the video:
“I was one of the 2 percent of people that are recognized as a legitimate whistleblower that found a dangerous policy and reported it. So, I should have been protected, but the U.N. decided to ignore its own rules. It was very blatant,” Reilly says. “You see just the sheer number of sex abuse scandals within the U.N., even by their own reckoning. There are—and this is literally according to their own figures—there are 800 cases of sexual harassment or abuse. No NGO could sustain that.”
Views expressed in this video are those of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Emma Reilly, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Emma Reilly:
Thank you for having me.
Mr. Jekielek:
Emma, you were fired from the UN for objecting to a secret policy of giving out the names of US and Canadian citizens, I mean dissidents who are working with the UN. How is this possible? Tell me about how this happened.
Ms. Reilly:
It shouldn’t be possible. It’s very definitely against the rules. But basically, the Chinese delegation in Geneva would just write to the UN bureaucrats and say, and say, Hey, can you tell us if these dissidents are coming or not? All of the UN human rights mechanisms are based in Geneva and China didn’t want to have its human rights record criticized. So they thought they would ask their friends at the UN for a favor.
Instead of saying no, like the UN did for every other country that asked, they simply handed over names. And we’re talking, as you said, about US citizens, Canadian citizens, UK, Germany. And the UN didn’t inform any of those countries that this was happening. And in fact, when they challenged them about it, they simply lied. They claimed it never happened.
Mr. Jekielek:
The US was at this time and still remains the largest funder of the UN. How does this work?
Ms. Reilly:
The way it works essentially is that China’s number two. When the US, Canada and other democracies give money to the UN, they usually do it in what’s called on-the-air marked funds. So they essentially say, here’s a blank check, spend this as you see fit. And the UN really encourages this, obviously, because they want to be able to use the money however they want to use it. Whereas when countries like China or Iran give money to the UN, it’s very tightly stated in those agreements how exactly that’s going to be spent. So even to things like when China gives money, it specifies every time that it cannot be spent in any country that has diplomatic relationships with Taiwan.
What that means is that in addition to all of the Chinese money depending on having diplomatic relations with China, you also have the UN development funds that are secretly dependent on that, even though it’s not actually stated anywhere publicly. So all that the democracies see is that the money for small island developing states is fully funded this year by China. And what they don’t see is that that means that any small island developing state that still has diplomatic relations with Taiwan will be under enormous pressure to switch allegiance.
Mr. Jekielek:
Many absolutely astonishing things you’re telling me here. This is official policy, yet it’s secret. How do we know about it?
Ms. Reilly:
Because I told people. In 2012, I thought I'd got my dream job working at the UN. I was working with NGOs that were at the Human Rights Council and I was their liaison in the Human Rights Council. I received one of these emails that was forwarded to me by my predecessor, essentially implying that I should hand over names. And I told her that that would not be happening.
Essentially, a fiction was put on for me. This had actually been happening since 2006. It was 2013 when I first found out about it and it was astonishing. My direct boss, a man called Eric Tistounet, put it in writing that it might exacerbate Chinese mistrust if we didn’t give them the names.
Mr. Jekielek:
Let me reiterate this. These are people who are, you know, dissidents to communist China. In many cases, they’ve settled in the US and Canada and other states. These are people that the Chinese Communist Party is looking to, at the very minimum, silence, if not, you know, worse. And the concern in writing was that it might make the Chinese feel bad?
Ms. Reilly:
Yes, essentially, we might have to have an awkward meeting at which we said, this is against the rules, you can’t have the names. Now, I was absolutely willing to have that awkward meeting. When you look at the sort of the emails that are exchanged back and forth, it’s a bureaucratic decision. But it’s not bureaucratic for the people’s families who are still in China. Those people are arrested, they’re pressured by the authorities. There have been cases of them being tortured. They’ve been imprisoned in concentration camps. Some of them have died in concentration camps.
This is not some kind of anodyne action. And this is information being given to China exactly when it feels it needs it, weeks in advance of these people ever actually showing up in Geneva to speak. So they have weeks to intimidate their family members still in China. And as I said, some of these people are US citizens, others have permanent residency in the US because of their status as dissidents. And the UN is deliberately endangering US citizens.
So of course, I reported that to the US. And what happened next, essentially, was the US delegation in Geneva went to see the very man who was handing over names and asked him, are you doing this? Now, very obviously, he has an interest in lying at that moment. And that’s exactly what he did. And in sworn testimony, he admits that he lied to the US government about this policy.
In all of their court filings, the UN admits this is an ongoing policy. I wasn’t fired for lying. I was fired for objecting to a policy of the Secretary General. And specifically listed in there was the fact that I had told the US delegation and Congress about it. So the UN essentially says that they have a right to lie to the US government, their largest donor, about handing over names of US citizens to the Chinese Communist Party, but that I had to be fired because I told them the truth.
Mr. Jekielek:
Emma, just to kind of unpack this further, we’re talking about the UN Human Rights Council, whose purpose is to safeguard human rights. It’s specifically to protect people in exactly these sorts of situations where they’re from a regime that is known to do the most extreme of human rights violations. By giving those names out, those people’s family members, if they’re in China or friends or something, can be intimidated or harmed or whatnot to basically prevent those people from doing the work they were going to be doing with the U.S. Human Rights Council in the first place.
So again, explain to me how this is possible.
Ms. Reilly:
I think it’s possible because you have a lot of people in the UN who have a very comfortable life and who prioritize their personal comfort over other people’s human rights. The UN works based on something called the Noblemaire Principle, which says that the UN must always be the most attractive place to work. So we’re paid better than the US equivalent. We’ve got better benefits than the Swedish. The UN will cover private education up to the age of 25 for your kids anywhere on earth. You can go see any doctor anywhere on earth, anytime. It’s all covered. It’s a very comfortable life. And I think that a lot of people, unfortunately, will prioritise that.
As I said in those emails, people will be tortured and killed as a result of this if you do this. And the response was we might have to have an awkward conversation with the Chinese ambassador. Even when I met directly at one point with António Guterres, the Secretary General, to discuss this issue, to try to get him to act. And he told me it would be difficult because it’s China.
And for context, some of the money that China gives to the UN goes directly to his office, $20 million a year. $10 million of that is to promote the Belt and Road Initiative. So it’s official UN policy that that must be promoted at all times, no matter how much of a debt trap it turns out to be. And another 10 million to whatever the Secretary General feels like spending that money on. And based on my conversation with him, where he didn’t seem to care about the individuals whose names were being handed over, I would say China’s getting its money’s worth.
Mr. Jekielek:
Emma, what is the Belt and Road Initiative, for our audience?
Ms. Reilly:
It’s China’s version of development cooperation, which is a lot more favourable to China.So it’s widely viewed as a debt trap, essentially paying for large infrastructure projects in the developing world and charging such large amounts of interest on the repayments for that, that a lot of the structures end up back in the hands of China. An example is Entebbe Airport in Uganda.
Mr. Jekielek:
So the type of financial relationship that you’re describing that exists here often actually exists sort of off the books. But again, you’re describing something that’s official policy, that’s transparent, that it might make some people kind of incredulous to believe that the UN has official policy to promote the Belt and Road Initiative of the Chinese Communist Party.
Ms. Reilly:
You can go and look it up for yourself. It’s called the Peace and Development Trust Fund, the ultimate sort of Orwellian doublespeak that you get at the UN, but it’s right there. When the US is giving money to the UN, they look at what the UN is planning to do this year, and what they would like to fund. China doesn’t do that.
China doesn’t let the UN decide what it’s going to have as its priorities. China imposes those priorities. It has this separate governing board for this money that doesn’t report back to the General Assembly, and doesn’t report back to the general UN coffers. So it’s very much a separate $20 million a year directly to the Secretary General. Now, there should at least be a debate in the UN as to whether that’s a funding mechanism that the UN should be encouraging.
Mr. Jekielek:
The US under the Trump administration now has withdrawn from the WHO, and there are rumblings of frankly even withdrawing from the UN entirely. Given the type of things you’re telling me, how do you view that?
Ms. Reilly:
I think it would be a huge mistake. I mean, China’s already taking over the UN while the US is in there. I would say instead of disengaging altogether, it would be time to go in and clean up. The US has done that in the past. And those worked for a couple of years. And then essentially, as everyone was looking the other way, the UN gutted them from any sort of possibility of working.
But I think it’s really important that the US maintains its position because if it doesn’t, it’s essentially ceding territory. It’s ceding the ground to China. China’s already trying to push the UN to fit the Xi Jinping thought. It was extraordinary, even when I was working there, sometimes I would get documents that I was writing, official UN documents would come back from the Secretary General’s office with things like win-win cooperation suddenly inserted in them, you know, things that are directly taken quotes from Xi Jinping thought.
And also one thing to think to remember is how this is all viewed from within the UN. Within the UN, the way they see it is essentially the US won’t pay its dues for a few years, then power will change hands in the US again, and we‘ll get the back payment, because that’s what’s happened in the past. So they aren’t that threatened by disengagement in the sense that the way they see it is they’ll disengage for a few years, they‘ll rejoin, and we’ll get the back payments.
One thing I do think, though, that would be really useful is the US used to have a law on the books, and it was actually introduced under the Obama administration, that said that if the UN retaliates against whistleblowers, they don’t get 10% of the money, and they have to improve whistleblower protection in order to get that back. Now, I was fired explicitly for telling Congress the truth. Congress needs to insist that that is no longer illegal within the UN, and that they can get true information about what’s happening. And when there are dangers to their own citizens, UN staffers that are brave enough can come forward.
Mr. Jekielek:
The bottom line is you’re saying you think the best thing for the US to do would be to stay engaged, but demand all sorts of accountability, like having very significant, serious strings attached. Tell me about your story. Dig into it a little bit more. So you were fired. What happened next?
Ms. Reilly:
Technically, I shouldn’t have been able to be fired because within the UN, one of the reforms that the US insisted on in the past was that the UN introduced whistleblower protection. This was after the oil for food scandal in Iraq. And the UN has always claimed to have this. Nobody actually gets whistleblower protection in the UN, but I did. I was one of the 2% of people that are recognized as a legitimate whistleblower that found a dangerous policy and reported it. So I should have been protected, but the UN decided to ignore its own rules. It was very blatant.
So within the UN system, I had named a woman called Catherine Pollard, who’s the head of management, as the person who was leading retaliation against me. So Catherine Pollard told everyone not to investigate the retaliation against me, placed me under investigation for having told the truth, so the act of whistleblowing essentially, and then fired me for it. So I was simultaneously recognised as having told the truth to the US and that that should be protected whistleblowing and fired for whistleblowing. It really is Orwellian when you get into the kind of the ways the UN structures work. It’s that kind of absolute power on the part of the managers.
That’s part of the problem because everyone who works with the UN has diplomatic immunity, so they can’t be held responsible in court. This policy is complicity with human rights violations. If you give China a name of somebody and they go to that person’s family and torture somebody, you’re criminally complicit in that act. But even though it’s an international crime, nobody at the UN can be held responsible.
So you have this extreme level power differential, where you’ve got dissidents who cannot speak out in China, who’ve managed to leave the country in a lot of cases, or who are sort of descendants of migrants, who are in a position where they should be able to speak out, who are going to the one room on earth where you’ve got Chinese diplomats who are required to sit there and listen to dissidents talking about what’s really happening.
And then you’ve got these sort of very powerful bureaucrats that can essentially just ignore all of their rights because it’s more convenient, because they don’t feel like having an awkward conversation with an ambassador. And even though all of the rules say that technically the whistleblower should be protected, they can just ignore those too, because nobody’s holding them to account. There needs to be accountability for the people who are committing the crimes.
Mr. Jekielek:
The US is undergoing a process right now of some kind of increasing transparency and accountability and cost cutting within the US government itself. Are you suggesting that the US should apply something like this to the UN?
Ms. Reilly:
The US can’t act alone when it comes to the UN. But I think that there’s enough member states, the democracies essentially, that recognize that there are problems. I mean, you see just the sheer number of sex abuse scandals within the UN. Even by their own reckoning, there are, and this is literally according to their own figures, there are 800 cases of sexual harassment or abuse. No NGO could sustain that. So I think there’s a recognition that there needs to be independent systems. And it’s actually very easy to do that.
There’s already been the votes in the General Assembly to have an independent ethics office, to have an independent investigation service. So you just need to separate it off from the secretariat, have it report to the General Assembly. There’s nothing here that’s terribly difficult. So yes, as the largest donor, it’s the US taxpayer money that is wasted on all of these ineffective oversight systems that don’t work. So instead of having those, let’s spend that money on systems that do work and that do root out the corruption.
Mr. Jekielek:
You’re basically suggesting that with the next payment handed over to the UN on the US side, there should be some very specific rules with clear oversight ability to assess whether the requirements have been met, much the way in this case, I think that the way that the CCP makes demands of the UN.
Ms. Reilly:
Yes, but the CCP demands get listened to because the UN takes them seriously, whereas they believe that the money from the US will always flow, no matter what the law says in Congress. And that’s a problem because at the moment, the corruption is very hidden. As you said, some of it is hiding in plain sight.
Mr. Jekielek:
Why is China giving 20 million a year as a slush fund for the Secretary General. Recently, there were 40 Uyghurs who were deported from Thailand back to communist China. There was a lot of criticism of Thailand for doing that in the first place. I’m kind of familiar to some extent with the realities there. About 20 years ago, I worked on specifically working to prevent these sorts of repatriations from happening because the Chinese regime was always pressuring the Thais to send back even people who were protected by the UN High Commission for Refugees. What happened here?
Ms. Reilly:
My knowledge of this is largely from reporting, but the New Humanitarian news agency had a really interesting scoop a few months ago where they released some internal communications in UNHCR [The UN Refugee Agency] in Thailand. And essentially, the Thai government had asked the UN for their assistance. And, you know, one of the points of the UN is that it’s supposed to be above the kind of political pressures that can be brought to bear on states, you know, the UN Human Rights Office is meant to prioritize human rights, the UN Office for refugees is supposed to prioritize the rights of refugees.
But instead of doing that, and arranging for repatriation of these people based on their protected status, the UN in its internal communications was saying, this could adversely affect China’s funding, so let’s not do anything. So essentially, they’re making this calculation, you know, how much is a human life worth?
And what’s really shocking is that at the time that those emails were sent, Volker Turk, who’s now the High Commissioner for Human Rights, was high up in the Office for Refugees, and he was one of the people taking these decisions. So you see the kind of way that individuals who are willing to prioritize China’s influence and China’s comfort over their own mandate manage to rise and rise in the UN, whereas people that object get fired.
Mr. Jekielek:
Basically, you’re telling me that the UN could have made accommodations, but basically chose not to based on the reporting.
Ms. Reilly:
Yes. And they specifically raised in those emails, China’s funding, that essentially, they didn’t want to be unpopular with China. Now, again, that’s the point of having the UN is to have a body that has a specific mandate. And it’s meant to apply that mandate fairly throughout the world. And again and again, you see exceptions for China.
Mr. Jekielek:
I’ve also been hearing about Taiwanese, including journalists, being banned from UN buildings. Have you been following this?
Ms. Reilly:
Yes. This essentially is, again, the UN bureaucrats, without even consulting member states, taking decisions based on what China is asking for. So it used to be the rule that you could get into the UN building with a photo ID. And that’s really important because stateless people, for example, will not have a passport. And what the UN has done is that they have secretly changed that rule that it is now government issued ID from a UN member state. So nobody with a Taiwanese passport can enter the UN premises.
Now, it used to be that they were able to do that. And this was a decision taken in both New York and Geneva by unelected bureaucrats without telling other member states that this was happening. In Geneva, they went one step further. And this was very specifically to prevent a US resident who is on China’s list from entering the building. So he’s already gone on record about this.
Yang Jianli was coming to the UN in Geneva to give a speech, And China was informed in advance that he would be coming. So they changed the rule again. They said it can now only be a passport issued by a member state because he has a travel document issued by the US, but it’s not a passport because he isn’t a US citizen yet. So they actually changed the rules specifically based on the policy that I reported, where China had advanced information that he was coming.
He had previously entered with no problem with that document. And in order to stop him even being able to get into the building to speak at the council, they changed the rules of entry for the entire building. And again, this is unelected bureaucrats behind closed doors without consulting a single member’s debt, simply based on a request for a favour from China.
Mr. Jekielek:
Absolutely astonishing. You have actually said that every UN agency bends to China’s will. What other examples do you have?
Ms. Reilly:
We all saw with the limitations China was putting on what the WHO was allowed to look at and not look at when they were looking for the origins of Covid. I was contacted by someone who was working on a report for the UN Environment Program, again, around the origins of Covid. And he was being pressured to include edits from China, essentially, about what he wanted to say in his report. You just see it again and again.
Mr. Jekielek:
As we keep talking, I feel you’re making the case for the US not to be so engaged in all of this activity because basically, the US puts in the lion’s share of the money, but the activity seems to be all for the benefit of the Chinese Communist Party, or at least in the first place, which is explicitly anti-US.
Ms. Reilly:
The way the UN is funded can essentially be broken down into two parts. There’s what’s called the regular budget, and then there’s voluntary contributions. And the regular budget goes a lot to the sort of political talking shops. So the General Assembly, the Security Council, made all of that stuff function. And then you’ve got the voluntary contributions where the US gives huge amounts of money.
Now, in order for the US to maintain its voting rights and things, there’s very little you can do about the regular budget, but you can do stuff about the voluntary contributions. The US, essentially, when I was reporting it to US diplomats, there was very much a sense that they didn’t want to be spending political capital on this, that they had other priorities. Well, if the new administration doesn’t have a particular priority within the UN, then make cleaning it up the priority. Give it a year, see if it works. In a sense, it’s the don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.
It’s completely corrupt. I’ve seen that, I think, more than most. But I don’t think it’s beyond saving. And I think it is important that countries cooperate, particularly in the face of a threat like the Chinese Communist Party. I think that multilateral cooperation has proven quite effective in the past. I think it can be again. I just think that this sort of bloated monster that the UN has become is a problem.
Because remember, the UN is supposed to be the civil service. It’s not supposed to be acting like a separate member state. The Human Rights Council had a rule. It very clearly said you do not get to be told in advance who is coming. That’s what member states decided. And this is the equivalent of some official in the State Department deciding to do the exact opposite of what Marco Rubio tells them. So if the UN goes back to being a civil service that is doing the will of the member states and not acting against the will of the member states to do favors for other ones, then I think it can be useful again.
Mr. Jekielek:
I remember 20 years ago, there were several what were called special mechanisms in the UN Human Rights Commission. One of them, the special rapporteur on torture, a man named Manfred Nowak, I remember because he was just this amazing Austrian human rights lawyer to whom we would submit credible reports of torture in this case for this special mechanism. And in some cases, a life could be saved using that mechanism. So that’s an example. Are those mechanisms still around? What’s the status of that?
Ms. Reilly:
And some of them are amazing. I love that you’re mentioning Manfred Nowak. He actually supervised my master’s thesis. I am a big fan of Manfred’s. He was an amazing special rapporteur. Those are independent mechanisms. So they’re not even paid a salary. They literally do their work for free. They’re appointed by the Human Rights Council. And some of them are absolutely amazing. A lot of it depends on who’s holding the post at the time.
But the special rapporteur on torture, the working group in arbitrary detention, the working group in enforced disappearances, all of these mechanisms have been incredibly effective sometimes about actually having an impact in China. And whenever you see something, I’m often told, but you know, they always say things about China. And if you actually look, it’s not the UN, sort of the paid staff that are doing it, it’s not the High Commissioner for Human Rights. It’s those special mechanisms that are saying there’s a weaker genocide, something needs to be done, that actions need to be taken to prevent torture, that Thai nationals shouldn’t be sent back. And those mechanisms can be incredibly effective. They’re very underused. But that’s the kind of part of the UN that we should be saving.
One of the things that you see actually now with a lot of those mechanisms is that because they’re so effective, and because China sees them as such a threat, what they’ve started to do is sort of create their own essentially counter mechanisms to take up all the talking time. So they have a mechanism and sort of, you know, international solidarity or unilateral coercive measures, i.e. sanctions. So, you know, if the US introduces sanctions against Russia, those are discussed as being some kind of human rights abuse. So it’s that kind of thing where you do enter again into the kind of Orwellian doublespeak where you have some mechanisms that very clearly aren’t really human rights mechanisms but are designed essentially as a counterbalance.
But those mechanisms are still there. And I would appeal to those as the reason why the US should stay engaged to ensure that those parts that do function continue to function. But when it comes to the actual secretariat and what is supposed to be the civil service, there, I think root and branch reform is what is required. And also, I mean, it can be done a lot cheaper. It often is done a lot cheaper and a lot better by NGOs. I would actually quite strongly advocate, and did even when I worked for the UN, for dividing the salaries in the UN by two.
There is no reason for someone who is supposedly committed to human rights to be earning quite so much. There is no reason for the head of investigations in the UN, a relatively small secretariat, to be paid more than the head of the FBI. It has become very bloated. Most of that money is going into salaries and benefits that are sort of out of, have lost any link with reality at this point. And I think that, yeah, a lot of savings could be made if there was sufficient will, but that’s going to take essentially US leadership to reform the UN.
Mr. Jekielek:
There’s this distinction between what I would describe as individual rights, which is what the UN Human Rights Council is supposed to be safeguarding, right? The individual rights that are outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights versus this idea of collective rights, which I see increasingly being promoted, for example, by the Chinese Communist Party at the UN. Have you followed this at all? Do you have any thoughts on that?
Ms. Reilly:
Oh, yes, I have many thoughts on this. It is telling that if you actually look at the public statements of the last two high commissioners, Michelle Bachelet and Volker Turk, they talk about climate change. They'll talk about environmental degradation. They will almost never mention freedom of expression. They will never mention those individual rights.
A lot of China’s work is being done for it by the people who are placed in these positions. Instead of standing up and saying that it is wrong to be torturing people and these people need to be released. The High Commissioner for Human Rights will leave that entirely to the special mechanisms that you mentioned. So the special rapporteurs are the ones who are publicly talking about that. But the public statements by UN officials when it comes to human rights are almost entirely devoid of substance. They will very, very rarely make a vague statement about a non-powerful country that might have repressed some protesters, but they will not come out and make statements about, for example, what is happening in Xinjiang.
The UN has an office on allegedly on genocide prevention, they have never once uttered the word Uyghur. So a lot of that collective rights discourse is now used essentially to kill the discourse on individual rights. And collective rights do exist. I’m not saying that they aren’t there. But by phrasing everything as collective rights, what you tend to end up with is a situation where nobody’s ever responsible. Because, you know, who are you going to hold responsible in a court for climate change if you see it as a human rights violation?
Whereas, for torture, you can usually point to the person who did it. And there’s this idea of sort of accountability and that rights are really meaningful for that individual, because if you violate that right, you can be held accountable. And you know, there are all of these other UN agencies that are dealing with climate change. But if you listen to what Volker Turk kind of says publicly, it’s his main issue. Whereas he works very hard to never ever mention China.
Every four years, each country in the UN, its human rights record is examined. And so all of the NGOs and civil society working in China and working in violations of individual rights were coming to Geneva for this meeting. And Volker Turk found some urgent human rights work to undertake next door in Liechtenstein. So you’ve got a quarter of humanity on one side and a microstate on the other. And he decided that that was the exact day that he needed to go to Liechtenstein.
So yes, I think that a lot of the discourse around collective rights is a way for the UN to essentially neuter the Human Rights Office, make sure you put people in that post that don’t care very much about human rights, and that will only speak about the human rights that China is okay with them mentioning. So, you know, economic and social and cultural rights and the right to a clean environment and that kind of thing, but never torture, never anything else.
Mr. Jekielek:
One exception to what you’re talking about actually is Israel, the only country that has a permanent agenda item at the Human Rights Council. Quick thought on that?
Ms. Reilly:
The UN has a huge problem of anti-Semitism, even within my own case. I don’t actually have any Jewish heritage, but another whistleblower within the UN did, a woman called Miranda Brown. She reported child sex abuse in the Central African Republic where peacekeepers had been raping children as young as eight years old. It was truly horrific. And she reported both those actions and the failures of the UN to respond.
It was extraordinary because I was watching this spokesperson of the High Commissioner for Human Rights being asked about my case. And he suddenly went into an anti-Semitic rant about her, completely unrelated to the case. I made a report about this, of anti-Semitism to the High Commissioner for Human Rights. I made that report in 2021 and I’ve yet to get a response.
It’s literally on video. It couldn’t be clearer. But yeah, I think that there is an almost reflexive anti-Semitism among some people in the Human Rights Office. I don’t think any country should be immune from criticism, but I do think that that criticism should be based on law and not essentially prohibited discrimination.
To give one example, the same man who put in place the policy of handing names to China, Eric Tistounet, had an absolute vendetta against an organisation called UN Watch and made some incredibly anti-Semitic comments to me about them, but also sent emails to his staff, encouraging them to go to internet cafes to put comments on UN Watch’s statements, essentially to try to shut them down and to insult UN Watch. Hillel Neuer, the executive director of UN Watch, got a copy of these emails and made a complaint to the UN. NGOs have the right to make a complaint, but they have no form in which to follow up if that complaint gets ignored. So the secretary general just ignored his complaint.
I made a complaint about the anti-Semitism and I have yet to hear back from the high commissioner, Volker Turk, who makes public statements about how much he deplores anti-Semitism, but has not acted on a complaint about it in his own office. And it’s been three years now since I made that complaint. So where exactly is the action? Where is the action on UN Watch’s complaint? It is not okay to have the person that’s running the UN Secretariat and the Human Rights Council discriminating against an NGO on the basis that that NGO is represented by someone of Jewish heritage. That’s not acceptable.
Mr. Jekielek:
In terms of member country lawmakers, of course, most importantly in the US, but also in Canada and other states, what would be your wish list?
Ms. Reilly:
Can I get very technical here? I want to see the law back in place on the US books that says that if the UN isn’t living up to its stated values of transparency, accountability and whistleblower protection, that the US will withhold funds. It’s vitally important that it was back into the Consolidated Appropriations Act. I’m not sure how it was taken out. It had bipartisan support, and it needs to be applied. There needs to be accountability.
One thing I would really appeal to, especially I think for the incoming US ambassadors to the UN, is to not be so credulous when UN officials tell you something. Because in my case, I literally have UN officials on the record under oath admitting to lying to US diplomats. And they weren’t concerned about admitting that under oath. They weren’t going to face any consequences. Lying to US diplomats was part of their job. And me telling them the truth for them was the problem.
So they need to essentially ask the question and verify the information that you get back.So for example, when it comes to the policy I reported, the UN says in court that that policy continues. And the last act before he retired of the man who put that policy in place was to hire someone as secretary of the Human Rights Council whose CV had been sent to him by the Chinese Communist Party. Now if you go and ask her the question, I am sure that she will say she does not hand over names.
Mr. Jekielek:
You’ve laid out some extremely disturbing realities during our talk here. Any final thoughts as we finish up?
Ms. Reilly:
I think there’s a tendency, I think especially when you get this deep into the worst of the UN, there’s a tendency to think it’s all there is. But as you said, there are still people out there like Manfred Novak who do care, who do the good work. If the UN can re-find its purpose, it can be a force for good in the world. The only way that that has a chance of happening is if the US government gets involved and really looks at transparency, accountability, and value for money. That would be a worthwhile endeavor.
Mr. Jekielek:
Emma Reilly, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Ms. Reilly:
Thank you so much for having me.
Mr. Jekielek:
We reached out to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, as well as current and former UN officials Antonio Guterres, Volker Turk, Catherine Pollard, and Eric Tistounet. The UN Office rejected Emma Reilley’s contentions and said that there have been independent reviews of her complaints. They did not deny that dissident names were provided to the Chinese regime. They contend that the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has the same standards for China as it does for all countries, and that they’ve spoken out regularly about both China’s human rights abuses and about anti-Semitism.
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