An expansive report has found that 46.6 per cent of UN procurement funding in Syria went to suppliers considered to pose a very high risk of association with the human rights abuses of the regime of President Bashar Al Assad.
The report was released on Tuesday by the Syrian Legal Development Programme and the Observatory of Political and Economic Networks.
It also found that 23 per cent of UN procurements were sourced from people on whom sanctions had been imposed by the US, UK and EU for their roles in supporting the Syrian regime, its human rights breaches and war crimes.
"UN agencies do not sufficiently incorporate human rights safeguards in their procurement practices, particularly in their assessment of UN suppliers and partners in Syria," the report reads.
"This exposes them to significant reputational and actual risk of financing abusive actors."
Officials in the US, the UN's largest donor country, responded promptly.
"As the leading provider of development and humanitarian assistance worldwide, the United States takes seriously any allegation of fraud, corruption or abuse of our aid," a US representative to the UN told The National.
"US humanitarian assistance is intended for Syria’s most vulnerable people — including children.
"All US government partners must have adequate risk-mitigation systems in place to ensure that US taxpayer-funded humanitarian assistance is reaching those for whom it is intended."
The findings relied primarily on investigations of the top 100 suppliers and aimed to identify the ownership of each company, locate the first-degree business network of its owners and identify any links to human rights abuse in Syria.
"The report is, frankly, unprecedented — the data it relies upon makes the big difference," Charles Lister, senior fellow and director of Syria and countering terrorism and extremism programmes at the Middle East Institute, told The National.
The report also found evidence that the largest aid contracts tend to be with entities that pose a higher risk of corruption and alignment with regime abuse.
The report's authors were adamant that the conclusions were "not at all anti-UN", and that its implications called for enhanced rather than reduced UN support.
"We engaged with the UN and we had response from the UN country team," Eyad Hamid, senior researcher at SLDP and the report's co-author, said at the report launch at the institute in Washington.
"And since then they have been very engaging with us. So it's not just an issue of accusation. We're really trying to reform the work and get to a positive outcome.
"They want their work to be good work. We need to help them do that."
Natasha Hall, a senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies and panellist at the report's launch event, said: "I think that the credibility and the sanctity of the international aid system is on the line at this point.
"And that is very unfortunate because we really need the international aid system at this time."
For panellist Sara Kayyali, a former Syria researcher for Human Rights Watch, the implications of the report challenged the strategy models for organisations such as HRW.
"When [HRW] started to look at humanitarian operations or human rights principles and humanitarian operations, the rationale for that was the [corruption] situation on the ground in Syria is so bad that we have no leverage," Ms Kayyali told the panel.
"To change the situation on the ground vis-a-vis the Syrian government, [we thought] the only people who have it, the only entities with a little bit of leverage to actively and principally improve the situation are UN agencies and humanitarian organisations and their donors. That was the rationale … and here we are."
The report provides sweeping data that has verified a joint January report with HRW, which claimed that UN agencies did not sufficiently incorporate human rights principles in their assessment of UN suppliers and partners in Syria.
The latest report was launched as the UN Security Council was meeting on Syria.
Its authors emphasised that the UN's donor countries must shoulder a heavier responsibility in doing their "due diligence" on where funding ends up.
The report's authors and panellists all strongly recommended increased collective bargaining among UN donors as a pathway to solution building.
"The situation currently is so bad, in fact, that it's so easy to to improve it with very little," Karam Shaar, report co-author and Syria programme manager at Open, told the panel.
"Everyone has a role to play, and a genuine role to play … donor states, they need to put the pressure on, they have the strings."
Mr Shaar suggested more oversight of how money was spent.
"I think the US should have a mechanism for reviewing how their aid money is [used]," he said.
"You don't just hand money over to implementers and assume good-will just because they're the United Nations. I think you should try to follow on and see exactly how that money is."
The US in September at the Security Council pledged $756 million in humanitarian assistance to the Syrian people.
Washington's mission pledged that the extra funding would help partners to “provide clean water, food, hygiene and relief supplies, shelter, protection services, and critical health and nutrition assistance".
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