New approach?: United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has proposed targeting fees paid to countries that provide troops. Credit:AP Last month, the UN managed the extraordinary removal from the Central African Republic (CAR) of a 630-strong military contingent of peacekeepers from the Congo Republic, for "sexual exploitation and abuses [in 2015 that] point to systemic problems in command and control". But in the same timeframe, a UN disputes tribunal was finalising its ruling that Brown's 2014 termination was an acceptable consequence of the UN's byzantine system of juggling staff contracts – and not, as she claimed, retribution for her blowing the whistle on the UN's response to the CAR scandal and other alleged irregularities at the UN. In 2003, the UN declared sexual abuse and exploitation – SAE in agency jargon – to be reprehensible. And two years later, it declared a "zero tolerance" policy – but earlier this year, an investigation tallied almost 2000 SAE allegations against peacekeepers and UN civilian staff globally in the 12 years since 2005. In more than 300 cases, the victims were children, according to investigative work done by Associated Press.

Safe haven?: A United Nations base in South Sudan's capital Juba. Credit:AP Accounts of abuse in CAR, where the UN assumed overall control of peacekeeping in 2014, are horrific. A young woman, who became pregnant and HIV-positive after her encounter with a peacekeeper when she was 14 years old, said she was given the equivalent of $US17 and a bag of rice as compensation. The seven-year-old victim of European soldiers was made to engage sexually with the troops in return for water and biscuits. Ugandan peacekeepers in CAR, charged with rooting out the last of the Lord's Resistance Army – an extremist militia whose tactics while terrorising communities in northern Uganda included abduction, rape and the abuse of boys and girls – were themselves accused of raping and exploiting young girls in CAR. Boxed in: former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon was eventually forced to appoint an independent investigation. Credit:AP The horrors are not confined to the Central African Republic. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, a Russian aviation company was allowed to renew UN contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, despite one of its helicopter crews drugging and raping a teenage girl – who they were seen kicking and defiling with a cigarette before they abandoned her, naked and unconscious, in a garden at their helicopter base.

Haiti, in the Caribbean, is another UN peacekeeping operation with its own nightmare accounts of abuse and exploitation. Due to be wound up in October, the 13-year-long mission has lurched from scandal to scandal. The UN's "responsibility to protect" policy has not been applied in many documented cases of rape and abuse by peacekeepers. When at least 134 Sri Lankan peacekeepers were implicated in a child sex ring, 114 of them were sent home quietly – none was jailed. An Uruguayan commander and four of his peacekeepers were accused of recording themselves gang-raping a teenager and when they posted the video online, it went viral – but back at home they were charged only with the minor offence of "private violence". When three Pakistanis in a UN police team were accused of raping and abusing a mentally disabled 13-year-old boy for more than a year, their commander was accused of arranging the boy's abduction to prevent investigators from interviewing him. The commander was not charged and though the other three faced courts martial, only one was jailed, and for only a year.

By the count of Associated Press, SAE allegation were more or less a monthly event for the UN in Haiti – about 150 formal allegations were made by local women, boys and girls between 2004 and 2016. Inevitably, that history challenges the credibility of recently appointed UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres' "new approach" to SAE, because somewhat jaundiced victims advocates say they have heard much of it before – and as revealed by the record, to little effect. Announced in March, the Guterres plan calls for the UN to stop paying multimillion-dollar fees to countries that provide peacekeeping troops, if they fail to investigate allegations against their soldiers "in a timely manner" – and for those docked fees to be paid instead into a fund for SAE victims. A UN report released at the time said that in 2016 alone, SAE allegations affected more that 300 "known victims", half of whom were children. It acknowledged, too, that a bigger story is yet to emerge – "We feel certain that not all cases are reported." A Portuguese diplomat who served for 10 years as the UN's high commissioner for refugees before becoming chief of the UN earlier this year, Guterres said on launching the new SAE plan, "Let us declare in one voice: we will not tolerate anyone committing or condoning sexual exploitation and abuse. We will not let anyone cover up these crimes with the UN flag."

Claiming to be rooted in transparency, accountability and ensuring justice, the plan calls for tighter vetting of job applicants and for all personnel to commit in writing to a full understanding the UN's SAE policies. It also threatens a ban on alcohol at UN peacekeeping bases. The plan proposes the appointment of a high-level official at UN headquarters as a victims' advocate, "to ensure that every victim receives appropriate care, follow-up attention, and information on the progress of his or her case", and for similar, on-the-ground appointments to the four missions with the worst SAE records – CAR, Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti and South Sudan. A "high-level meeting" on SAE is suggested during the coming September meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York. But countries that provide peacekeeping troops are expected to resist the move to penalise them for transgressions by individuals or groups among their military and police contingents. UN critics, like Paula Donovan, a co-director of the global advocacy organisation AIDS-Free World, which fights UN SAE under the banner of its Code Blue Campaign, cast the UN as hamstrung by its own limitations – it needs usually poor countries to provide manpower and deep-pocketed countries to pay for it, and because both groups of countries become skittish and, for different reasons, threaten to withdraw in the face of widely reported SAE allegations, the organisation is culturally geared to suppressing information and diffusing investigations. Central to UN investigations is the Office of Internal Oversight Services, an internal agency that has never lived up to its 1990s architects' intention that it be truly and fiercely independent in rooting out fraud, abuse and waste.

"[That] was an anathema to the culture of the organisation and the powers that be," Bruce Rashkow, a former US State Department lawyer who worked with Congress to help create the OIOS, told Foreign Policy magazine in 2015. "The creation of an internally independent office … runs contrary to the culture and long practice of the UN, whose instinctive reaction is to avoid embarrassment … at all costs." The upshot, by Rashkow's reckoning, is an endless struggle, of varying intensity, for control of or influence over OIOS' work, with successive UN bosses and their advisers attempting to "cultivate a 'collegial' relationship with the head of OIOS … whereby there would be consultation and collaboration in the handling of sensitive cases … an endless battle by the administration and UN staff to rein in and, in effect, undermine the ability of the [OIOS] Investigations Division to fulfil its mandate." Donovan acknowledges that SAE allegations now are being revealed earlier than in the past. But she is scathing on the Guterres plan – "it's a very clever reconfiguring of all that has been talked about before", she told Fairfax Media. Explaining Code Blue's demand for "a new, independent judicial body, an investigative court, overseen by UN member states, but outside the purview of the Secretary-General", Donovan argued that, "The UN continues to protect itself, and offers itself as a neutral party when, in fact, it takes the role of defence and prosecution, judge and jury, in these criminal cases … offering legal advice and witness protection to the accuser when the accused is their employee is a pretence. "It's all a fig leaf – there can be no justice when the UN, with no legal authority, polices itself. It has to get out of the business of investigating itself – even the Catholic Church now understands that clerical wrongdoers must be handed over to the legitimate legal authorities."

The experience of two Australians – the diplomat Miranda Brown and Melbourne-born investigator Mick Stefanovic – are instructive on the pitfalls of trying to do the right thing at the UN. Anders Kompass, a Swedish diplomat on secondment as field operations director for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, triggered a global firestorm in 2014 by alerting French authorities to allegations that peacekeeping troops from France, Chad and Equatorial Guinea had been using biscuits and other military rations to barter for sex with impoverished kids at a camp for displaced civilians near Bangui, the CAR capital. The French troops were not under a UN mandate and though Kompass had acted to end abuse of which the UN was aware but had failed to stop, senior UN officials were more aggrieved that the Swede might have leaked a confidential report; and so OIOS was sooled onto Kompass. Stefanovic, who at that time headed the OIOS Investigations Division, refused to act on the instruction from OIOS' then boss Carmen Lapointe. Instead, he informed a committee of UN member states that in ordering a politically motivated witch-hunt to destroy Kompass' career, Lapointe had gone off the reservation. Stefanovic, at times a homicide detective, and a war crimes and business corruption investigator, can't talk about his UN days. But others have fleshed out the story of how his charge of misconduct by Lapointe and other senior officials effectively boxed-in then secretary-general Ban Ki-moon – whose only option was to acquiesce in the face of demands from the US and other governments to appoint an independent investigation.

That investigation's 143-page report, released at the end of 2015, exonerated Kompass and lambasted UNICEF, in particular, for an "appalling" 12-month delay in helping the child victims of the French and other peacekeepers and for exaggerating accounts of the psychological support it offered to them; and the UN generally, for its failure to establish if other children had been victims. Also on secondment to UNHCHR, Brown, 51 and a British migrant to Australia, reported to Kompass and on hearing that he had been escorted from his office, suspended and was under OIOS investigation, she jumped into the fray in protest against what she judged to be an abuse of authority by UN bosses – and became a key witness in the Kompass inquiry ordered by Ban. She too leaked the report – attaching it to letters of protest, which she fired off to the US, British and Australian UN missions in Geneva. Further, she wrote to Ban and others on the UN poop deck, demanding that they stop the persecution of Kompass. "In our office, people were unhappy, worried that they would be exposed for not acting to halt the abuse, but I decided we had to have an immediate lessons-learnt process. [Kompass] was being scapegoated – it was not as though you can't not act on child abuse in a UN camp," she told Fairfax Media in a phone interview from her home in Geneva. Brown had been warned to "watch her back" – and in October 2014 she was advised her contract would not be renewed, a rare occurrence at the UN.

Her appeal to the UN Ethics Office for protection as a whistleblower was denied. And in that there's an irony – Brown, too, didn't consider herself a whistleblower, because she believes that as an Australian diplomat on leave from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, she was obliged by Australian law, as Kompass was obliged by Swedish law, to report immediately and fully to relevant authorities on child abuse. "I was rather naive – I never thought it would all result in the loss of my job," she said. In that, Brown is not alone – very few whistleblower complaints are fully investigated at the UN. Among more than 400 claims of retaliation after whistleblowing from among a 40,000-strong staff between 2006 and 2014, 97 per cent were rejected. If the likely failure to be protected as a whistleblower doesn't douse the enthusiasm of young UN staffers who might reveal the next CAR-like scandal, the conditions under which they work in conflict zones almost certainly will. In April 2016, Brown went further out on a limb, testifying before a US congressional committee on the reality of life for human rights officers assigned to UN peacekeeping missions and refugee camps.

"They have their own fears, about their physical safety as well as their own job security," she told the committee, as she outlined an absence of institutional support, "extremely harsh" living conditions among refugee crowds and security provided by the peacekeeping force. "The security situation outside of the camps may be so dire that the human rights officers are either unable to leave the camps, or have to be accompanied by the peacekeepers, in order to interview victims of human rights violations," Brown explained. "This creates an inherent conflict of interest for human rights officers in terms of reporting misconduct and human rights violations by the peacekeepers." Recounting an encounter with a junior human rights officer who often worked alone at an isolated UN camp in South Sudan, Brown described how the officer reported to headquarters on violations by parties to the conflict. "She described the terrible human rights violations inflicted on the civilian population, which included torture, mass killings, sexual and gender-based violence, forced marriage and abortion." Then Brown's story became even darker – "She also told me about the abuses committed by peacekeepers. She said she had been too scared to report them.

Loading "The victims were [locals displaced by the conflict]. She worried the alleged perpetrators might find out about her monitoring … and she feared the victims might be subject to reprisal by the peacekeepers. "She also feared for her own physical safety due to possible retaliation, directly or indirectly, by the peacekeepers."