March 20, 2022 — 5.00am
, register or subscribe to save articles for later.
Singapore: Australian judge Rowan Downing, QC, has accused the United Nations of an “attack upon the independence of the judiciary” and a coup d’etat after he was removed from the case of a whistleblower who had accused the global body of passing on information to Beijing about Chinese dissidents.
Downing, past President of the UN Dispute Tribunal and a former international war crimes judge, oversaw the case of Emma Reilly, a UN human rights officer-turned whistleblower, after she accused her employer of handing Beijing the names of Uighur and other Chinese dissidents set to speak at the UN Human Rights Council.
Downing had his appointment terminated by the UN in July 2019 before he could release his final judgments on Reilly’s case.
He said that his two judgments relating to Reilly’s case in the internal UN Dispute Tribunal were “within 10 days of being released” when he was dismissed in 2019 and this “was probably known to management”. The 69-year-old’s comments during the hearings were critical of Reilly’s treatment by the UN.
“It’s the sort of conduct that happens possibly following a coup – a coup d’etat – where people want to get rid of judges quickly,” Downing said of his dismissal. “It was, in fact, an attack upon the independence of the judiciary because… no nation-state would be able to acceptably do that.”
China has put the UN at the centre of its global...
In January of 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice reported a record-breaking year for False Claims Act recoveries, with the vast majority related to healthcare. What the DOJ report does not captu...