The UN Development Program Rewards North Korea

Brett Schaefer / October 01, 2009

The era of engaging the world’s worst actors continues apace with the recent announcement that the United Nations Development Program has formally returned to North Korea and restarted its program there on Wednesday September 30, 2009. For those who don’t know the history, information provided by whistleblowers to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations led the U.S. to question UNDP about its practices and activities in North Korea. Based on the information it received, the U.S. initiated an investigation that revealed numerous UNDP violations of U.N. rules and regulations and led the UNDP executive board to suspend its activities in North Korea in March 2007. According to a FoxNews summary of an independent audit commissioned by UNDP and released in May 2008, UNDP “routinely, and systematically… disregarded U.N. regulations on how it conducted itself in Kim Jong-Il’s brutal dictatorship, passing on millions of dollars to the regime in the process.” (more…)