While all eyes are on the circus surrounding the trip by Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, a quiet but important showdown over misconduct is shaping up at high levels of a major United Nations agency in Geneva. In this case, one of the whistleblowers is none other than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
That is the story sketched in a United States State Department “priority action” cable obtained by this reporter, indicating that the agency is the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organization, or WIPO, which is the global registry and guide for international copyrights, patents, and intellectual-property law. The fracas centers on the behavior of a Sudanese national who has run WIPO since 1997 and worked there since 1982, Director-General Kamil Idris.
Early last year Idris had his own U.N. personnel file amended to drop nine years from his age — thus allegedly acquiring a new lease on U.N.-related opportunities and benefits, possibly including a payout of more than $500,000 from WIPO when his current term as director-general expires in 2009. Following his age change, Idris is now officially 53 years old, instead of 62. According to the State Department cable, which was sent out in June over the name of Rice to dozens of U.S. embassies worldwide, that’s just one piece of a disturbing picture.
Secretary Rice’s cable states that WIPO under Idris “has experienced multiple scandals in recent years,” the most recent — involving his age change — emerging in a 2006 WIPO internal audit report that, according to the Rice cable, concluded Idris “had violated WIPO staff rules and ethical standards by using two different dates of birth (DOB) at WIPO for personal gain.” The cable noted that “Idris has been involved in previous dubious activities at WIPO, including questionable use of WIPO resources for personal items such as construction of a swimming pool at his residence.”
Other alleged abuses include Idris providing false information about his birth date to the U.S. State Department. The Rice cable says he used his previous and apparently false birth year — 1945 instead of the currently preferred 1954 — not only for purposes of WIPO records and the United Nations pension system, but also “with the Swiss government and on visa applications to many countries, including the United States, without indicating it was incorrect or attempting to correct it.”
