PICK OF TODAY’S TV

THE WHISTLEBLOWERS: INSIDE THE UN, 9PM, BBC2

FOR more than 70 years, the United Nations (UN) has been at the forefront of work to uphold human rights and promote global peace — but allegations of widespread sexual abuse and corruption across many of the UN’s agencies are stacking up. At great personal cost the people in this eye-opening documentary reveal their accounts of what happened when they tried to expose these wrongdoings, and took on the UN’s hierarchy and its culture of silence. The interviewees have dozens of years experience between them at the UN, in agencies ranging from the Development Programme to UNAIDS and the Human Rights Council, but by speaking to the media they have put at risk careers they thought were for life. The result is a shocking film that raises some very worrying questions about an organisation with an annual budget of more than £50 billion and some 35,000 staff, most of whom are protected by immunity from local laws. That means it falls to the UN itself to follow up complaints internally. But, according to one contributor, ‘They spend more effort, more time, more resources to investigate the whistleblower than they do to investigate the corruption.’