NOTot the United Nations as well. We live in resignation to the idea that our political parties, law enforcement agencies, independent standards agencies and sports governing bodies are functionally corrupt and deeply chauvinistic. Now Whistleblowers: Inside the UN (BBC Two) is here to tell us that the closest thing we have to an expression of global conscience is a source of shame as much as a source of hope.

Anyone who has studied the workings of the UN Security Council knows that the UN is an iniquitous instrument of power, not a check on it, but Whistleblowers suggests the parts you might still naively consider pure – the collective effort to fighting disease, hunger and climate change – ripples with the familiar stench of powerful people who seem to care only about how to preserve and abuse their positions. The documentary combines disparate testimonies from former senior UN officials, to accumulate a breadth and depth of evidence that becomes overwhelming.

We start with Emma Reilly claiming that a boss canceled her when she refused to let China see the names of Uyghur activists who were due to attend a Human Rights Council meeting. She feared that they would be targeted by state repression. One of these activists claims that his family was targeted.

OK, maybe it’s just a jaded director, and in any case, program officials received a statement from the UN disputing Reilly’s claim. But then we hear from James Wasserstrom, who says he found evidence that the bidding process for building a power plant in Kosovo was compromised by bribes, and John O’Brien, who worried that an environmental program in Russia had succumbed to money laundering scams.

Reilly, Wasserstrom and O’Brien all separately allege that once they spoke out, the UN prosecuted them. O’Brien was suddenly accused of soliciting and viewing nude photos on his phone at work (O’Brien considers the allegations vexatious). Wasserstrom was promised whistleblower protection, and then his identity was leaked to the very people he had accused. Reilly has footage of Swiss police entering her apartment and refusing to leave: she says the UN sent them and told them Reilly was a suicide risk. “Indeed,” she recalls, “the UN tried to have me cut off.” By the time she convinced them it was a false alarm, she had missed an online meeting in which she had planned to raise the identity disclosure of the activists – it turns out that the cops arrived just at the start of the meeting.

Yet while the trio’s tears seem real, perhaps all three are lying and the UN’s categorical denials are the truth. But we’re not even halfway through a 90-minute program that never runs out of material. Next, journalist Jeremy Dupin recounts how he came to suspect that leaking latrines at a UN base in Haiti caused a catastrophic cholera outbreak that began in 2010 and claimed the lives of more than 10 000 people. Attempts to hold anyone accountable have been evasive.

Somehow, after this allegation, the program manages to be shocking in a new way. Because, of course, we’re not talking about powerful people here. We’re largely about powerful men, and in its later stages Whistleblowers focuses on an organizational culture of misogyny and rape. We hear how peacekeeping troops in Haiti and the Central African Republic have been implicated in numerous horrific sexual assaults against vulnerable residents, and meet one of the victims – along with former Deputy Secretary General Tony Banbury, who resigned appalled by UN indifference response to raped child in CAR: “I needed the organization to prioritize this girl. They prioritized authors.

The most painful testimonies – presented, like everything else in this methodical dossier, with a sober lack of sensationalism – are those of three women who worked for the UN to help people affected by floods, poverty or AIDS. . They make detailed allegations that their careers were derailed when they reported senior colleagues for serious sexual misconduct. When Purna Sen, former UN spokesperson on sexual harassment, says the UN badge is “a fantastic cloak for abuse”, it highlights what’s particularly troubling here: the nature of its work should make the United Nations a safer institution in which to work. in or with whom to deal than, say, a multinational corporation, but its supposed inherent goodness gives bad apples a natural impunity. We remember the infallibility granted to the Catholic Church in the 20th century; in the 21st, the secular sanctity of the UN offers the same type of men a similar protection. Stronger, in fact, since – as Haitian cholera victims discovered when they tried to press charges – if you work for the UN, you usually have legal immunity.

So whistleblowers fit into one of the themes of the times: we placed our trust in certain institutions to enforce vital rules, but we built those institutions like hierarchies of toxic boys’ clubs. where the rules, depending on who you are and how much power you wield, don’t always apply.