Think the UN is a squeaky-clean outfit working hard to better the world. Think again. This is not an isolated case.

A SENIOR United Nations official is demanding that her colleagues involved in the sex trade in Bosnia should be stripped of their immunity and prosecuted.



Madeleine Rees, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Bosnia, has broken ranks to demand that UN officials, international peacekeepers and police who are involved in sex crimes be brought to justice in their home countries.

Speaking exclusively to Scotland on Sunday, the British lawyer has also launched an outspoken attack on her former boss. She accuses Jacques Paul Klein, the former head of the UN Mission in Bosnia, of not taking UN complicity in the country’s burgeoning sex trade seriously enough.

In recent years there has been a massive increase in the trafficking of women in Bosnia, including girls as young as 12. The women are taken from their homes in eastern Europe by organised criminal gangs and brought to Bosnia, where they are forced into prostitution.

The trade in these so-called ‘sex slaves’ hardly existed until the mid-1990s. It was fuelled by the arrival of tens of thousands of predominantly male UN personnel in the wake of the signing of the Dayton Peace Accord by Bosnia, Croatia and Yugoslavia in 1995.

Rees said: "Visiting brothels where women have been gang-raped into submission, into slavery, is not part of the UN’s mandate.

"Without an enforceable code of conduct, immunity often means impunity. We should look at ways of waiving that immunity.

"I would be very happy to see the possibility of prosecutions for rape or assault in the UK. There is no question this should happen."

Rees, who has served in Bosnia since 1998, said she had encountered stiff opposition from western officials in her attempts to tackle the trafficking of women.

" They don’t want to know about it," she said.