A key figure at one of the United Nations’ most troubled organs, its Human Rights Council, is flouting the body’s rules and discriminating against the council’s leading critic, UN Watch, and its executive director, Hillel Neuer, according to a new complaint made available to the Sun. 

In its complaint to UN Secretary General Guterres, Mr. Neuer demands that the Human Rights Council Branch’s chief, Eric Tistounet, a French national, be suspended from his job until allegations of discrimination against UN Watch are fully investigated. 

The complaint alleges that brass of the Geneva-based body has barred Mr. Neuer from addressing the council, even though the rules allot time for non government organizations like UN Watch to speak at its sessions. In the council’s most recent session, in June, UN Watch requested appearances at 36 events.

“We got zero,” Mr. Neuer told the Sun. Other NGOs, which are less critical of the council, were slated to speak instead of UN Watch. A spokesman for the rights council, Rolando Gomez, told the Sun that in the June-July session seats were limited and “the number of opportunities for NGOs to address the Council were reduced.”

Mr. Neuer alleges, however,  that the animosity has gone beyond muzzling UN Watch at formal sessions. In emails seen by the Sun Mr. Tistounet encouraged his staff to widely publicize a strange incident in which the Boston police mistakenly arrested Mr. Neuer on suspicion of murder.

Mr. Tistounet suggested an international arrest warrant would be issued by Interpol based on the incident, even though it was widely reported that the arrest was a case of mistaken identity.  

Mr. Neuer’s decades of exposing malfeasance, bias, and corruption at Geneva, and his public confrontations with its luminaries, have gone viral on social media and in the press. He has defended Israel, by far the country most maligned by the council, exposed some bizarre behavior by officials, and defended whistleblowers. 

One of the officials exposed by UN Watch was a council’s expert on the “right for food,” Jean Ziegler of Switzerland. Mr. Ziegler co-created “the Muammar Qaddafi Human Rights Prize.” In 2002 the winner of that prize, worth 100,000 Swiss Francs, was Mr. Ziegler himself.

Exposing such corrupt behavior gained Mr. Neuer some fame — as well as enemies, including Mr. Tistounet, a close ally and friend of Mr. Ziegler.  Mr. Tistounet’s animosity to UN Watch was raised even further when Mr. Neuer went to bat for a council insider turned whistleblower, Emma Reilly.

In 2013 Ms. Reilly, who worked for Mr. Tistounet, complained internally about one of the worst transgressions in the history of the Geneva body. She reported to her superiors that council officials handed over to Beijing the names of Uighur and other dissidents in Communist China ahead of their scheduled address to the council. Beijing would  then prevent the dissidents’ travel, arrest them, or endanger their lives.

After Ms. Reilly’s complaint went unattended internally, the scandal was exposed in a French newspaper, Le Monde, and then the Sun and other publications. Ms. Reilly was eventually fired. A UN spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, denied to this reporter at the time that Ms. Reilly was a whistleblower.  

“I have been at pains not to name names and to present this as a systemic issue,” Ms. Reilly said, adding however, “at the end of the day the problem is a man called Eric Tistounent.” The French government, she said, “has been protecting him from any consequences, deliberately endangering Chinese HR defenders since at least 2006.”

“A wealth of evidence demonstrates that, for over fifteen years, Mr. Tistounet has systematically discriminated against and defamed UN Watch and illegally flouted rules set by UN member states in order to limit our participation in the UN Human Rights Council,” Mr. Neuer, a Canadian-born lawyer, writes in the complaint to Mr. Guterres.

The complaint is accompanied with internal communication that Mr. Neuer legally obtained, and details a well-chronicled history of the events that led to narrowing his appearances at the council, leading up to the ban.  

“Mr. Tistounet has engaged, encouraged and instructed his staff to engage, in what may only be termed a campaign of harassment against UN Watch and its director since at least 2007, which has, in addition to interfering with our work, created an intimidating, hostile and offensive work environment for UN Watch staff on UN premises,” the complaint alleges. 

“You made my day,” Mr. Tistounet replied to another UN official, who widely distributed the news of the mistaken arrest of  Mr. Neuer in Boston  in 2007. That is despite the fact that the official, UN Spokesman Stephane Dujarric, started his email with the fact that Mr. Neuer “was cleared of all wrongdoing after a mistaken arrest in a Boston pizzeria” and that the real suspect sought in the case was arrested shortly afterward. 

“It is a wonder come true,” Mr. Tistounet wrote, adding “Question is how to put it on youtube without living [sic] a trace. He suggested that someone “outside the UN” would go to an Internet cafe and post the arrest video. Also, he wrote to an underling that if an Interpol arrest warrant would be issued against Mr. Neuer, the council’s brass would conveniently “forget” to dismiss that case, as it normally does in similar circumstances.   

The council’s spokesman wrote in an email that speaking slots at the council speaking opportunities at the Human Rights Council “are generated automatically, through a system which assigns speaking slots on a first-come-first-served basis.” He noted that UN Watch and Mr. Neuer were able to address the the council on numerous occasions in the past, except in the latest session limited speaking slots kept them out.