UN Contracted for Supply of Syrian Aid With Companies Involved in Human Rights Abuses, Report Finds

Dozens of private companies that the United Nations contracted with to supply humanitarian aid to Syria in 2019 and 2020 were involved in human rights abuses or may have benefited from them, according to a new report. The nonprofit Observatory of Political and Economic Networks and the nongovernmental organization Syrian Legal Development Program have released a report – “UN Procurement Contracts in Syria: A ‘Few’ Bad Apples?” – that analyzes the UN’s top suppliers in Syria over the two-year period; the companies received about $68 million in UN contracts. The Syrian civil war, which started in 2011, has left hundreds of thousands of people dead and displaced millions both internally and outside of the country. The report, which relies on official Syrian gazette and open-source intelligence to investigate the backgrounds of the top 100 private and public-private suppliers in Syria in 2019 and 2020, representing  94% of total procurement spending, also recommends practical and context-sensitive steps to donor states and UN agencies to ensure the aid is directed at the Syrian people and not the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.