In a briefing to the UN General Assembly last month, Lute stressed that “much has been done”, and outlined a package of toolkits and guidelines that is in the works.

But nearly two years after the CAR scandal broke, Donovan is scathing. “Although he says he has zero tolerance, Ban Ki-moon has appointed someone to coordinate what has been identified as just a failed, broken system.

Who’s protecting whom in CAR?

“If you set the bar so low – that you are going to coordinate these dysfunctional entities, and try and improve the response – that just says it all,” she said.

While the UN has focused on reforming the system at the ground level, critics point to the relative impunity enjoyed by those in the highest echelons of the UN civil service – an accountability vacuum they say the Kompass case has laid bare.

Abusing authority

The independent panel’s report found that three officials had specifically “abused their authority”: Babacar Gaye, the special representative of the secretary-general for MINUSCA; Carman Lapointe, under-secretary-general for the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), and Renner Onana, the chief of the Human Rights and Justice Section in MINUSCA.

Ban fired Gaye in August 2015 after UN peacekeepers were accused of raping a 12-year-old girl and killing a 16-year-old boy and his father. Lapointe, who initiated the internal investigation into Kompass, resigned in September 2015. But Onana remains a senior official in the UN mission in CAR.

Susana Malcorra, Ban’s chief of staff, came in for criticism by the independent report over a “conflict of interest”. She facilitated a meeting with OIOS and the UN Ethics Office – two bodies that should operate at arm’s length from the UN system – to discuss what to do about Kompass. The report, however, absolved her of abusing her authority.

She resigned in November 2015 to become Argentina’s foreign minister. Her hat is in the ring as a candidate to succeed Ban as secretary-general.

The meeting to discuss the Kompass case was held at the urging of Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and Kompass’ boss. He had “a single-minded determination to pursue an investigation” into Kompass and “undoubtedly” risked compromising the independence of OIOS and the UN Ethics Office, the panel report found.

Zeid “is still vocally, publicly refusing to acknowledge what Anders did was appropriate, and what he [Zeid] did was wrong and retaliatory,” said Bea Edwards of the US-based Government Accountability Project, which tries to protect whistleblowers.

Zeid told the New York Times last year that he felt Kompass had done “the right thing wrongly”. Zeid’s office did not respond to IRIN’s requests for comment. Neither did OIOS, the Ethics Office or UN spokesman Stéphane Dujarric.

Hard decision

Kompass says he shared the internal report with the French authorities with the sole purpose of ending the abuse as quickly as possible. Doing so was not in and of itself wrong, according to UN procedures – in fact, sharing information with governments to advocate for changes in behaviour was part of Kompass’ job description.

But while the UN has suggested that Kompass did not follow normal procedures, the independent panel said it was “disingenuous” for the UN to label his actions as “misconduct”.

Citing a separate case in which Kompass was accused of providing information to the Moroccan government about Western Sahara for “personal gain”, one past media report suggested that he was seen in the UN as “an untrustworthy shill for a foreign government”.

Such rhetoric and Kompass’ treatment may well give other potential whistleblowers pause.

“The point of whistleblowing is that somebody will be held responsible for criminal misconduct,” said Edwards. “Those that have taken the risk to report should be protected, commended and rewarded.”

Kompass, 60, is to resign on 31 August, one year before the end of his current contract. He has accepted a job at the Swedish foreign ministry.

“It was a very hard decision for me to take, after a total of 21 years of service with the United Nations,” he told IRIN, “but one that I feel was unavoidable.”