EXCLUSIVE: The U.S. State Department has taken a symbolic step to withhold money from a United Nations organization, in order to show concern about the ethical standards and whistle-blower protection at the scandal-tarred World Intellectual Property Organization, or WIPO.
The amount of money involved is puny -- less than $370,000 -- compared to the billions in support that the Obama administration gives to the U.N. annually. In 2010, it ceased compiling the annual total. It also doesn’t matter much to WIPO, which gets 94 percent of its $674 million budget for 2014-2015 from fees through its patent services.
But it is the first time that the Obama administration has decided not to certify the ethics and whistle-blower behavior of any U.N. agency as “best practices” under a section of this year’s Appropriations Act that mandates at 15 percent withholding of U.S. contributions if an agency -- or the U.N. itself -- fails to meet the test.
The decision also turns a spotlight back onto WIPO, a little-known Geneva-based organization that safeguards and allows access to the world’s patent system and other intellectual property -- and its highly controversial two-term director general, Francis Gurry, whose autocratic behavior has increasingly ruffled feathers in Washington and other capitals.
Read more:
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/09/17/us-sanctions-un-agency-under-whistleblower-law-in-unprecedented-move/
