UNITED NATIONS (AFP) - UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was embroiled in a new scandal after it emerged that he cleared a top official of sexual harassment despite an internal enquiry which backed the victim`s claims.
Annan cleared Ruud Lubbers in July after a woman on his staff claimed she had been groped by the ageing former Dutch prime minister, who has been the UN`s High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva since 2001.
But red-faced UN officials admitted on Thursday that an investigation by the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), an internal watchdog, had backed the unnamed woman`s allegations in a report to Annan.
The UN chief, rocked this year by other scandals involving allegations of fraud in Iraqi oil sales and the bizarre discovery of a missing airplane black box locked in a file cabinet, then decided to pardon Lubbers.
"The secretary general has the right to accept or reject such recommendations," spokesman Fred Eckhard said at a testy press conference at UN headquarters in New York.
"The secretary general reviewed the evidence and he made his decision," Eckhard said.
He said Annan had consulted lawyers and concluded that the case against the 65-year-old Lubbers outlined in the OIOS enquiry, which was never released to the public, was "unsustainable."
Pressed to explain what that meant, a visibly irritated Eckhard replied: "Legal basis, legal basis, legal basis."
Eckhard said that a "technical error" had accounted for the release of an earlier draft of the OIOS report that made no mention of the findings of the Lubbers enquiry.
But the United Nations released a correction that made clear that the oversight office had backed up the woman`s claims.
The damning paragraph said the female staffer had complained of being sexually harassed by Lubbers and later, in "related" incidents, had been harassed by a senior manager of his staff.
"OIOS submitted a report to the secretary general supporting the allegations and recommended that appropriate actions be taken accordingly," it said, noting Annan had decided the allegations "could not be substantiated by the evidence and closed the matter."
In July, Annan sent UNHCR staff a letter saying he had informed Lubbers of his "duty to defend the right of staff members" after it emerged that Lubbers had pressed the woman to drop her complaint.
Lubbers has denied sexually harassing the woman.
In an ironic twist, the news about Lubbers broke as the UN Security Council was discussing a report from Annan that denounced the world`s "collective failure" to prevent violence against women.
The UN chief has been tried to keep the lid on a number of scandals that have erupted over the past year, and earlier this month blamed a "campaign" against the United Nations for damaging the world body`s image.
Investigators are currently probing allegations that UN officials were paid off by Saddam Hussein`s regime while the United Nations supervised its oil sales between 1996 and 2003.
Earlier this year, UN officials admitted they had been holding a black box from an airplane in a locked file cabinet for a decade -- two days after ridiculing the idea, which was reported in a French newspaper.
The report said the flight recorder may have come from the plane crash that set off the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, which occurred Kofi Annan was in charge of UN peacekeepers who were on the ground but did not prevent the slaughter.
The black box was found in a UN peacekeeping office. The United Nations said an investigation determined that the flight device did not come from the plane in question.
10/28/2004 - 22:29 GMT - AFP