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April 9, 2025 - Epoch Times
24:05
How the United Nations Betray Chinese Dissidents: Whistleblower Emma Reilly
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I was one of the 2% of people that are recognized as a legitimate whistleblower that found a dangerous policy and reported it.
So I should have been protected, but the UN decided to ignore its own rules.
It was very blatant.
Emma Riley worked as a human rights lawyer at the United Nations.
She discovered that for years, the Human Rights Council had been handing over the names of Chinese dissidents slated to attend the UN to the Chinese regime.
This included the names of US, Canadian and European citizens.
The CCP demands get listened to because the UN takes them seriously, whereas they believe that the money from the US will always flow no matter what the law says in Congress.
And that's a problem.
After speaking out and informing the US of what she says was a criminal practice at the UN, she lost her whistleblower protection status and was fired.
You see just the sheer number of sex abuse scandals within the UN.
Even by their own reckoning, and this is literally according to their own figures, there are 800 cases of sexual harassment or abuse.
No NGO could sustain that.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellek.
Emma Riley, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thank you for having me.
So Emma, you were fired from the UN for objecting to a secret policy Of giving out the names of US and Canadian citizens.
I mean, dissidents who are working with the UN.
How is this possible?
Tell me about how this happened.
It shouldn't be possible.
It's very definitely against the rules.
But basically, the Chinese delegation in Geneva would just write to the UN bureaucrats and say, hey, can you tell us if these dissidents are coming or not?
All of the UN human rights mechanisms are based in Geneva, and China didn't want to have its human rights record criticized.
So they thought they would ask their friends at the UN for a favor.
And instead of saying no, like the UN did for every other country that asked, they simply handed over names.
And we're talking, as you said, about US citizens, Canadian citizens, UK, Germany.
And the UN didn't inform any of those countries that this was happening.
And in fact, when they challenged them about it, they simply lied.
They claimed it never happened.
I can't help but notice that the US was at this time and remains the largest funder of the UN.
How does this work?
Well, the way it works essentially is that China's number two.
And when the US, Canada and other democracies give money to the UN, they usually do it in what's called on-the-air marked funds.
So they essentially say, here's a blank check.
Spend this as you see fit.
And the UN really encourages this, obviously, because they want to be able to use the money.
However they want to use it.
Whereas when countries like China or Iran give money to the UN, it's very tightly stated in those agreements how exactly that's going to be spent.
So down even to things like when China gives money, it specifies every time that it cannot be spent in any country that has diplomatic relationships with Taiwan.
So what that means is that in addition to all of the Chinese money depending on having diplomatic relations with China, you also have the UN development funds that are secretly dependent on that, even though it's not actually stated anywhere publicly.
So all that the democracies see is that the money for small island developing states is fully funded this year by China.
And what they don't see is that that means that any small island developing state that still has diplomatic relations with Taiwan will be under an enormous pressure.
I mean, so many absolutely astonishing things you're telling me here.
So this is official policy, yet it's secret.
How do we know about it?
Because I told people.
In 2012, I sort of thought I'd got my dream job working at the UN and I was working with NGOs that were at the Human Rights Council.
So I was their liaison in the Human Rights Council and I received one of these emails.
It was forwarded to me by my predecessor.
Essentially implying that I should hand over names.
And I told her that that would not be happening.
And essentially, a fiction was put on for me.
This had actually been happening since 2006.
And this was in 2013 when I first found out about it.
But I mean, it was astonishing.
They basically said, and my direct boss, a man called Eric Teaster, and I put it in writing that...
It might exacerbate Chinese mistrust if we didn't give them the names.
Let me reiterate this.
These are people who are dissidents to communist China.
In many cases, they've settled in the US and Canada and other states.
These are people that the Chinese Communist Party is looking to at the very minimum silence, if not worse.
And the concern in writing was that it might make the Chinese feel bad?
Yeah, essentially, we might have to have an awkward meeting at which we said, this is against the rules, you can't have the names.
Now, I was absolutely willing to have that awkward meeting.
When you look at the emails that are exchanged back and forth, it's a bureaucratic decision.
But it's not bureaucratic for the people's families who are still in China.
Those people are arrested.
They're pressured by the authorities.
There have been cases of them being tortured.
They've been imprisoned in concentration camps.
Some of them have died in concentration camps.
This is not some kind of anodyne action.
And this is information being given to China exactly when it feels it needs it, weeks in advance of these people ever actually sort of showing up in Geneva to speak.
So they have weeks to intimidate their family members still in China.
And as I said, some of these people are US citizens.
Others have permanent residency in the US because of their status as dissidents.
And the UN is deliberately endangering US citizens.
So, of course, I reported that to the US.
And what happened next essentially was the US delegation in Geneva went to see The very man who was handing over names and asked him, are you doing this?
Now, very obviously, he has an interest in lying at that moment, and that's exactly what he did.
And in sworn testimony, he admits that he lied to the US government about this policy.
In all of their court filings, the UN admits this is ongoing policy.
I wasn't fired for lying.
I was fired for Emma.
The UN essentially says that they have a right to lie to the US government, their largest donor, about handing over names of US citizens to the Chinese Communist Party.
But that I had to be fired because I told them the truth.
Just to kind of unpack this further, we're talking about the UN Human Rights Council whose purpose is to safeguard human rights.
It's specifically to protect people in exactly these sorts of situations where they're from a regime that is known to do the most extreme of human rights violations.
By giving those names out, Those people's family members, if they're in China or friends or something, can be intimidated or harmed or whatnot to basically prevent those people from doing the work they were going to be doing with the U.S. Human Rights Council in the first place.
So again, explain to me how this is possible.
I think it's possible because you have a lot of people in the UN who have a very comfortable life and who prioritise their personal comfort over other people's human rights.
The UN works based on something called the Noblemare Principle, which says that the UN must always be the most attractive place to work.
So we're paid better than the US equivalent.
We've got better benefits than the Swedish.
The UN will cover private education up to the age of 25 for your kids anywhere on earth.
You can go see any doctor anywhere on earth anytime.
It's all covered.
It's a very comfortable life.
And I think that a lot of people, unfortunately, will prioritise that.
I mean, as I said in those emails, I was saying people will be tortured and killed as a result of this if you do this.
And the response was, we might have to have an awkward conversation with the Chinese ambassador.
Even when I met directly at one point with Antony Guterres, the Secretary General, to discuss this issue, to try to get him to act, and he told me it would be difficult because it's China.
And, you know, for context, some of the money that China gives to the UN goes directly to his office.
$20 million a year.
$10 million of that is...
To promote the Belt and Road Initiative, so it's official UN policy that that must be promoted at all times, no matter how much of a debt trap it turns out to be.
Another 10 million to whatever the Secretary General feels like spending that money on.
And based on my conversation with him, where he didn't seem to care about the individuals whose names were being handed over, I would say China's getting its money's worth.
And very briefly, Emma, The Belt and Road Initiative summed up for our audience?
It's China's version of development cooperation, which is a lot more favourable to China.
So it's widely viewed as a debt trap, essentially paying for large infrastructure projects in the developing world and charging such large amounts of interest on the repayments for that, that a lot of the structures end up back in the hands of China.
An example is Entebbe Airport.
The type of financial relationship that you're describing that exists here often actually exists off the books.
But again, you're describing something that's official policy, that's transparent, that it might make some people kind of incredulous to believe that the UN has official policy to promote the Belt and Road Initiative of the Chinese Communist Party.
And look it up for yourself.
It's called the Peace and Development Trust Fund.
The ultimate sort of Orwellian doublespeak that you get at the UN, but it's right there.
And like I said, when the US is giving money to the UN, they look essentially at what is the UN planning to do this year and what would we like to fund of that.
China doesn't do that.
China doesn't let the UN decide what it's going to have as its priorities.
China imposes those priorities, has this sort of separate governing board for this money that doesn't report back to the General Assembly, doesn't report back to the general UN coffers.
So it's a very much a separate 20 million a year directly to the Secretary General.
Now, there should at least be a debate in the UN as to whether that's a kind of funding mechanism that the UN should be encouraging.
Emma, just one moment.
We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back.
You may have noticed it's Shen Yun season again, but I wanted to tell you a little bit personally about why I love this show and go see it every year.
Aside from being beautiful, it's actually a homegrown American dream success story.
All things from traditional China were under attack during the Cultural Revolution and have kind of really remained that way since.
And traditional Chinese dance was almost destroyed, but Parts of it actually survived.
So what the Shen Yun people did is in upstate New York they brought together the people that actually remembered what it was all about and kind of rekindled it, put it back together, rebirthed it in upstate New York.
They started with one company in 2006.
Today there's eight of them touring the world.
A million people see it every year.
I mean just think about that.
In under 20 years, pulling your boots up, no government funding.
And they brought back traditional Chinese dance to the world.
The tagline is China before communism.
Something speaks very deeply to me personally.
The Chinese Communist Party has been trying to destroy this group, prevent them from performing all these years.
And over the last year, the New York Times has even been going after Shen Yun, using a lot of the same talking points that the Chinese Communist Party has been using.
And with these increased attacks, I particularly feel motivated personally to invite you to see Shen Yun and actually see for yourself what it's all about, how amazing it is, how inspiring it is.
So to find out where Shen Yun is performing near you, check out Showtimes at ShenYun.com.
S-H-E-N-Y-U-N dot com.
You can use the code JAN25 to get theater ticketing fees waived.
Again, that's JAN25.
I can't stress how highly I appreciate this show and how much I think you will love it.
And we're back with Emma Riley, UN whistleblower and human rights lawyer.
The U.S. under the Trump administration now has withdrawn from the WHO and their rumblings of Frankly, even withdrawing from the UN entirely.
Given the type of things you're telling me, how do you view that?
I think it would be a huge mistake.
China's already taking over the UN while the US is in there.
I would say instead of disengaging altogether, it would be time to go in and clean up.
The US has done that in the past.
The US was responsible for the creation of accountability mechanisms within the UN.
And those worked for a couple of years.
And then, essentially, as everyone was looking the other way, the UN gutted them from any sort of possibility of working.
But I think it's really important that the US maintains its position, because if it doesn't, it's essentially ceding territory.
It's ceding the ground to China.
China's already trying to push The UN to fit the sort of Xi Jinping thought.
It was extraordinary, even when I was working there, sometimes I would get documents that I was writing, official UN documents would come back from the Secretary General's office with things like win-win cooperation suddenly inserted in them, you know, things that are directly taken quotes from Xi Jinping thought.
And also one thing to think, to remember is how this is all viewed from within the UN.
Within the UN, the way they see it is essentially the US won't pay its dues for a few years, then power will change hands in the US again and we'll get the back payment because that's what's happened in the past.
So they aren't that threatened by disengagement in the sense that the way they see it is they'll disengage for a few years, they'll rejoin and we'll get the back payments.
One thing I do think though that would be really useful is the US used to have a law on the books and it was actually introduced under the Obama administration that said that if the UN retaliates against whistleblowers they don't get 10% of the money and they have to improve whistleblower protection in order to get that back.
Now I was fired explicitly for telling Congress the truth.
Congress needs to insist that that is no longer illegal within the UN, and that they can get true information about what's happening, and when there are dangers to their own citizens, that UN staffers...
I mean, the bottom line is you're saying you think the best thing for the U.S. to do would be to stay engaged but demand all sorts of accountability, like have very significant, serious strings attached.
Tell me...
About your story.
Dig into it a little bit more.
So you were fired.
What happened next?
Well, I technically shouldn't have been able to be fired because within the UN, one of the reforms that the US insisted on in the past was that the UN introduced whistleblower protection.
This was after the oil for food scandal in Iraq.
And the UN has always claimed to have this.
Nobody actually gets whistleblower protection in the UN, but I did.
I was one of the 2% of people that are recognized as a legitimate whistleblower that found a dangerous policy and reported it.
So I should have been protected.
But the UN decided to ignore its own rules.
It was very blatant.
So within the UN system, I had named a woman called Catherine Pollard, who's the head of management, as a person who was leading retaliation against me.
So Catherine Pollard told everyone not to investigate the retaliation against me.
So I was simultaneously recognised as having told the truth to the US and that that should be protected whistleblowing and fired for whistleblowing.
It really is Orwellian when you get into the kind of the ways the UN structures work.
And it's that kind of absolute power on the part of the managers.
And that's part of the problem, because everyone who works at the UN has diplomatic immunity, so they can't be held responsible in court.
I mean, this policy is complicity in human rights violations.
You know, if you give China a name of somebody and they go to that person's family and torture somebody, you're criminally complicit in that act.
But even though it's an international crime, nobody at the UN can be held responsible.
So you have this extreme level
of power differential where you've got dissidents who cannot speak out in China, who've managed to leave the country in a lot of cases or who are sort of descendants of migrants,
who are in a position where they should be able to speak out.
they can just ignore those too because nobody's holding them to account.
There needs to be accountability for the people who are committing the crimes.
The US is undergoing a process right now of some kind of increasing of transparency and accountability and cost-cutting within the US government itself.
Are you suggesting that Something like this, the US should apply something like this to the UN?
The US can't act alone when it comes to the UN, but I think that there's enough member states, the democracies essentially, that recognize that there are problems.
I mean, you know, you see just the sheer number of sex abuse scandals within the UN.
Even by their own reckoning, there are, and this is literally according to their own figures, there are 800 cases of sexual harassment or abuse.
No NGO could sustain that.
So I think there's a recognition that there needs to be independent systems.
And it's actually very easy to do that.
There's already been the votes in the General Assembly to have an independent ethics office, to have an independent investigation service.
So you just need to separate it off from the Secretariat, have it report to the General Assembly.
There's nothing here that's terribly difficult.
So, yeah, as the largest donor, it's U.S. taxpayer money that is wasted on all of these ineffective oversight systems that don't work.
So instead of having those, let's spend that money on systems that do work and that do root out the corruption.
"I don't know.
But so you're basically suggesting that before the next payment is handed over to the UN on the US side, there should be some very specific rules with clear oversight
ability to assess whether the requirements have been met, much the way in this case, I think, that the way the CCP makes demands of the UN.
Yeah, but the CCP demands get listened to because the UN takes them seriously, whereas they believe that the money from the US...
We'll always flow no matter what the law says in Congress.
And that's a problem.
Because at the moment, the corruption is very hidden.
As you said, some of it's hiding in plain sight.
Why is China giving 20 million a year as a slush fund for the Secretary General?
You've laid out some extremely disturbing realities during our talk here.
Any final thoughts as we finish?
If the UN can re-find its purpose, I think it can be a force for good in the world.
And I think that the only way that that has a chance of happening is if the US government gets involved and really looks at transparency, accountability, and at the end of the day, value for money.
And I think that that is a worthwhile endeavour.
Well, Emma Riley, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thank you so much for having me.
We reached out to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, as well as current and former UN officials Antonio Guitarez, Volker Turk, Catherine Pollard, and Eric Toussaint.
The UN Office rejected Emma Riley's contentions and said that there have been independent reviews of her complaints.
They did not deny that dissident names were provided to the Chinese regime.
They contend that the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has the same standards for China as it does for all countries.
Thank you all for joining Emma Riley and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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