While all eyes are on the circus surrounding the trip by Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, a quiet but important showdown over misconduct is shaping up at high levels of a major United Nations agency in Geneva. In this case, one of the whistleblowers is none other than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
That is the story sketched in a United States State Department "priority action" cable obtained by this reporter, indicating that the agency is the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organization, or WIPO, which is the global registry and guide for international copyrights, patents, and intellectual-property law. The fracas centers on the behavior of a Sudanese national who has run WIPO since 1997 and worked there since 1982, Director-General Kamil Idris.
Early last year Idris had his own U.N. personnel file amended to drop nine years from his age
Ms. Rosett, a Foreign Policy Fellow with the Independent Women’s Forum, a columnist of Forbes and a blogger for PJMedia, is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.
