UN premises are inviolable – and any country defying that sanctity is guilty of an illegal act, UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said Thursday, responding to assertions that intelligence officers spied on Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
"We have seen today’s media reports alleging that the secretary-general’s phone conversations were tapped by British intelligence," Eckhard told reporters. "We would be disappointed if this was true."
The spokesman was commenting on claims that UK intelligence intercepted phone calls to Annan’s offices in the run-up to the U.S.-led military attack on Iraq last March.
Eckhard said such actions would undermine the integrity and confidential nature of diplomatic exchanges. "Those who speak to the secretary-general are entitled to assume that their exchanges are confidential", he added.
Clare Short, Britain’s former minister for international development, told the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on Thursday that UK intelligence agents routinely spied on Annan before the war against Iraq.
Just weeks before the attack, the secretary-general was constantly in touch with several world leaders in an attempt to stall an invasion of Iraq and find a peaceful solution to the crisis.
"The UK in this time was also getting spies on Kofi Annan’s office and getting reports from him about what was going on," Short said. "In the case of Kofi’s office, it was being done for some time. I read some of the transcripts of the accounts of his conversations," she added.
Asked whether anyone close to Annan could have been involved in leaking information to British intelligence, Eckhard said there was no reason to suspect staff members who worked in the secretary-general’s office on the 38th floor of the UN Secretariat in New York.
"All UN staff are expressly prohibited from taking instructions from governments," he added.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair dismissed the allegations as "deeply irresponsible". "I am not going to comment on the work of our security services – do not take that as an indication that the allegations made by Clare Short are true", he told reporters.
"I really do regard what Clare Short said this morning as totally irresponsible and entirely consistent," Blair added.
Short resigned her cabinet post last year in disagreement with Blair over the war on Iraq.
Eckhard said the secretariat routinely takes technical measures to guard against such invasions of privacy, and those efforts will now be intensified.
He added that the alleged spying would violate three international treaties: the 1946 Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations; the 1947 Headquarters Agreement between the United Nations and the United States; and the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
Last month reports surfaced that at least two UN missions in New York – of Mexico and Chile – were bugged by U.S. intelligence just before the Iraq war.
At the time, both countries were non-permanent members of the Security Council whose votes were being canvassed by the United States for a resolution calling for a military attack on Iraq.
Washington eventually dropped the resolution because it failed to generate the necessary nine votes – and no vetoes – for adoption by the Security Council.
Mexico’s former UN Ambassador Adolfo Aguilar Zinser was quoted as saying, "yes, there was spying. The United States has always used spying to anticipate decisions of other countries and to try to rope them in".
Last year, there were reports of a "surge" of eavesdropping on ambassadors and diplomats representing several other member states in the Security Council, including Angola, Cameroon, Bulgaria, Guinea and Pakistan.
A London newspaper published a memo nearly three weeks before the invasion of Iraq from the US National Security Agency, which sought help from British intelligence in bugging the delegates’ homes and office telephones.
On Wednesday, the British government dropped charges against 29-year-old translator Katharine Gun, who was accused of breaking the UK’s Official Secrets Act by leaking the memo. Gun is a former employee of British intelligence.
Asked about the bugging of member states’ missions, Eckhard said that too was illegal. Although it was outside the UN purview, any such spying violated the 1961 Vienna Convention, he added.
Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, said that both Blair and US President George W. Bush want the issue of spying at the United Nations to go away.
"That’s one of the reasons the Blair government ended its prosecution of whistleblower Katharine Gun on Wednesday," he said. But within 24 hours, Solomon added, the scandal of UN spying has exploded again.
"Truly, the integrity of the United Nations is at stake here. If top officials in Washington and London believe that there’s nothing wrong with bugging the most private conversations of any and all diplomats in New York, those US and British officials must be persuaded otherwise," Solomon told IPS.
This is a time when delegations to the United Nations from around the world should "connect the dots", and see the links between a US foreign policy that bullies the world into war yet is contemptuous of basic diplomatic standards at the United Nations, he added.
