Emma Reilly, who had exposed the UN's dealings with China, was last week fired from her job.
Let’s start with the conclusion: Emma Reilly was last week fired from her job. Fired officially because she had been formally advised not to talk to the press and social networks and she did not oblige. A better excuse, then, according to Reilly, must be the usual pretext the United Nations uses to fire whistleblowers – charges of sexual misconduct for men, and of being mentally unstable for women.
Being fired, trashed and having your career over is the price to be paid, it seems, for denouncing the privileges UN Human Rights Council has granted to China and how its representatives, under pressure or for other reasons, have been playing at Beijing's tune.
The story starts a long ago when Reilly had just started working for the UNHRC. She had been in office for just over a year when in March 2013, an astonishing message arrives in her inbox from a Chinese diplomat based in Geneva, asking for a “favour” to confirm the information about “anti-government Chinese separatists” individuals to be accredited to attend the Human Rights Council. Her direct superior, Eric Tistounet, head of the Human Rights Council Branch of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), agreed and was instructing the staff to share the names with China “not to exacerbate the Chinese mistrust against us”, despite the practice being explicitely forbidden by UN rules.
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