NOWADAYS we are all very dependent on the email system. Indeed, it is hard to imagine what life was once like without emails. The United Nations team in Cyprus is no exception. As you can imagine, it sends a stream of emails backwards and forwards to New York. And bearing in mind I spend half of my time at home in Adelaide, I get a lot of emails from Nicosia myself.
And as you all know, our private lives are also substantially reduced to emails. You can imagine how shocked the United Nations was a year ago when the email system of one of the United Nations staff in Cyprus was hacked into and the emails stolen. They didn’t just steal 10 or 20: they stole thousands. It wasn’t just that the emails were stolen, it was what they did with them. The emails were sent to a local newspaper which then distributed a selection of them around the rest of the media and published a fair few itself.
The poor staff member who had her emails stolen and then published in the Cyprus media was just distraught, as you would be. It wasn’t just that they published the personal thoughts of people in the United Nations about Cyprus but the thought that the media also had access to her personal life even though that was not published. Tears were shed, counselling given and complaints made to the Cypriot authorities.
Initially, there were all sorts of denials by the Cypriot authorities that the emails had been stolen. There was a simply fantastic story that someone in the UN in New York put the emails on a disk and gave them to the Cypriot media. It is hard to imagine what motive anybody in the United Nations in New York could have to do that. The trouble is, in publishing the emails, the media left a trail which was followed by the United Nation’s technology people and they found how the emails had been stolen. The staff member’s webmail account was hacked into in a Nicosia hotel. A few other enquiries revealed who had stolen them.
The law, it seems, isn’t worth much in situations like this. Have a think about the laws and conventions which have been broken here. First of all, the United Nations has a status of forces agreement with Cyprus under which its personnel are supposed to be protected, including their privacy. Not much protection seemed to take place here.
Secondly, it is against the national law of Cyprus for anybody to steal another person’s emails. That is pretty much standard practice anywhere although in the case of Cyprus there are no exceptions from this law for the police and intelligence services. In many countries, such exceptions do exist.
Thirdly, there is a directive from the European Union which makes it illegal for any invasion of privacy of this kind to take place anywhere within the European Union. And finally, stealing people’s emails and publishing those emails is in contravention of rulings of the European Court of human rights. It’s not just that the stealing of them is obviously a crime: publishing them is also a breach of the European Convention on human rights as well as the European Union’s directive.
A year later, a book has been published based on these emails. It includes a rather creative interpretation of what the emails say but that isn’t really the point. To publish the emails in a book is clearly in contravention of the European Convention on human rights and European Union law.
So some members of the Cypriot parliament have decided to take this issue up itself. Well, some members have and some have been opposed to this so there is a bit of division about that. Those who wish to pursue it, you might think, wish to investigate why these breaches of law and European standards of human rights have taken place within their own country. After all, you would imagine that members of Parliament in Cyprus would be very embarrassed that such a thing had happened to the United Nations of all organisations.
Not a bit of it. The investigation which some members of Parliament want is into whether through these private emails the United Nations has been behaving appropriately. You would think it would be impossible to behave inappropriately through private emails. Unless, of course, you were breaking the law!
The government of Cyprus, to its credit, has been opposed to the establishment of the Parliamentary enquiry. Let us be clear about that. But can you imagine the effect all this has had on the morale of the people who work for the United Nations: in particular the person whose emails were stolen. Here she is, coming to faraway Cyprus to work for a good cause of peace and the locals steal her emails, give them to the media and then set up a parliamentary enquiry into her emails. And all this, in the European Union!
First published in The Adelaide Review on September 30
