by FRANK WATKINS
World Bank logo IMAGE/Europa
The last time a Black man was stripped of his inalienable rights to his identity in the US was during the institution of slavery. In 2015, the World Bank Administrative Tribunal took its jurisprudence back to the dark ages, ruling that a Black complainant of Ethiopian origin, who accused the World Bank of violating his rights to his identity – professional and personal – has no basis for legal protection from defamation.
During the same session, the Tribunal ruled that an Argentinean citizen has inviolable rights to his identity, and found the Bank liable for failing to honor and protect his rights against defamation. The judgment emphasized that the Tribunal takes defamation claims very seriously, especially when “the Bank’s actions and inactions caused professional and personal harm to its staff or former staff.” No explanation was given why the same judicial principles did not apply to the Ethiopian.
As documented by the Bank’s Senior Advisor for Racial Equality, “the injustice [the Ethiopian] was subjected to is profoundly beyond the pale.” The Government Accountability Project (GAP), America’s premier civil liberty organization, noted: “Two attorneys familiar with the Bank’s personnel practices who could not speak publicly, told GAP unequivocally that [the Ethiopian’s] case was the worst case of racial discrimination they had ever seen.” Unprecedentedly, the US Treasury was compelled by the raw racism to intervene. The case was the subject of two open letters penned by Reverend Jesse Jackson addressed to Pope Francis and President Obama.
Because the Bank is immune from US laws, victims of discrimination are confined to an internal Administrative Tribunal. Since its inauguration in 1980, the Tribunal has rejected all racial discrimination claims filed by Black claimants. This, in an institution whose own report revealed that institutional racism in the World Bank has been established “with varying degrees of empirical rigor in 16 Word Bank diversity studies”.
The Ethiopian’s 2015 case involved an appeal to review the Tribunal’s earlier judgments on his racial discrimination claims. The appeal was based on two specific legal grounds. The first was confined to one issue, which the Tribunal addressed scantly at best. The second part was the primary part of the appeal. It focused on over 100 pieces of documented material evidence that the Tribunal systematically suppressed to deny him due process in his pursuit of justice to honor and restore his professional identity and personal reputation.
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