In our on-going effort to demystify the law and to support those who wish to use it, study it, or change it, our team analysed each organisational policy that governs 'prohibited conduct' and extracted from them the key timelines for filing a formal complaint, procedural steps internally and fora for appeal. We hope this effort to synthesize information into a one-glance table is not only easy to use, but also showcases the extent of the unnecessary differences and divergence in policy approaches to internal justice mechanisms at international organisations in general, but the UN in particular. It is also hoped that ongoing efforts by the UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee to harmonise these approaches will benefit from our efforts.
While policies encourage complaints to be filed as soon as possible after an incident, deciding to report misconduct can be a difficult decision to reach and navigating the policies and procedures maybe well be among the many discouraging factors. Further, the time-limits to file such complaints vary dramatically across organisations, ranging from only 30 days to no time limit at all. We have, therefore, attempted to simplify access to justice by creating this easy-to-use tool for victims/ survivors/ third party complainants of prohibited conduct. We hope through this to give quick answers to some of the most pressing questions - “who” can complain against whom? what are the deadlines? “when” do they start report? “how” and “where” to file a formal complaint? and “what” happens after it is filed? Try it, just click on the name of your IO.
We note that this is not meant to be an exhaustive map of all procedures, but a tool to simplify the numerous steps of internal procedure. As such, we have linked the underlying policies where relevant for those seeking a more detailed understanding of the applicable law.
In our previous post on organizational policies, we noted how painful it was to gain access to some policies. This continues to be the case. We are aware that some of these policies are “under revision” (for example, UNHCR), but have yet to gain access to them. We, therefore, renew our request of our visitors: if you do not find your IO here, or are in possession of policies that are not including here, or a have a more recent, updated version of the policies listed here, please reach out to us through our Contact page or email. We are immensely grateful to our friends and well-wishers in helping us grow this compendium to build a one-stop reference library for all stakeholders.
AAPC hosts the largest public collection of organisational policies relating to prohibited conduct, ethics, investigations and related mechanisms.
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