Training session on employment relations within the United Nations

United Nations Information Centre (UNIC) held a training session entitled “Employment relations within the United Nations” for some 20 UN staff and interns on 29 June 2016 at the UN office in Tehran, AVA Diplomatic reports.

The organizer was UNIC Intern Mr. Amir Arsalan Eskandari and the instructor was the University of Tehran Ph.D. student of international law Mr. Mehdi Ghasemi.

At the beginning of the session, a short video prepared by UNIC-Tehran on the occasion of the 26th of June and signing of the UN Charter was screened. Then UNIC Reference Assistant Nazanin Ghaemmaghami started the morning session with the important point that the Charter requires International Civil Servants to meet the highest standards of efficiency, competency and integrity. She added that its articles 8, 97, 100, 101 and 105 are related to the service of the staff. She introduced Staff Rules and Staff Regulations as two important UN Secretary-General Bulletins which are compulsory to be read by all staff.

Ms. Ghaemmaghami then talked about job and internship opportunities in Iran as well as UN Careers in general. She introduced the web pages of the Young Professionals Programme and the fact that this year Iran is one of the participating countries, UN Volunteers, and Internship programme.  UN System Staff College, United Nations International Civil Service Commission, the Ethics Office, the United Nations Ombudsman and Mediation Services, the United Nations Administrative Tribunal, Office of Administration of Justiceas well as Handbook on the internal justice system at the United Nationswere also among the webpages that were introduced and discussed.

Mr. Ghasemi as an expert on the issue, started his detailed lecture with some points about international civil service principles such as independency, loyalty, impartiality, non-discrimination and equal geographical distribution.  Then he described the law governing international civil service and briefed the participants about different offices of the UN Secretariat. He talked about UN agents such as staff, non-staff personnel, contractors, UN Police and military observers, gratis personnel, employed retirees as well as judges of international tribunals among others.

The instructor continued with categories of posts within the United Nations, job competition, appointments, essential qualifications and so forth. At the end, he answered the participants’ questions.

UN staff and interns from agencies such as UNESCO, UNHCR, UNICFE, UNDP, FAO, UN Habitat, OCHA and UNIC were among the participants and they all found the training session very informative and useful. Ms. Mojdeh Moezi from UNESCO said “Although I have many years of experience in the UN system but still this session provided lots of new and useful information to me and I am grateful to UNIC for holding it”.