Club Aids Diplomats’ Wives Who Have Been Left Behind

As the wife of a U.N. official from Ghana, Gloria Kpeli followed her husband around the world, raising their children and volunteering for U.N. activities. But there’s one group she never thought she would join: the United Nations Family Rights Committee, unofficially known as “The First Wives’ Club.”

It’s a collection of women from around the world who were left by their U.N.-employed husbands and have been unable to collect family support. The United Nations’ organizational immunity from the laws of member-states made it easy for staff members to evade court orders and difficult for lawyers to get the records needed to enforce claims.

But after years of ignoring the problem within its own ranks, the United Nations--known as an advocate for women’s and children’s rights around the world--is beginning to force its own deadbeat dads to pay up.

In May, thanks to lobbying by the wives group, Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared the problem an “issue of moral concern” and announced a new policy. After a 30-day grace period, the U.N. now will deduct court-ordered support from officials’ paychecks.

“We’re certainly hoping that the staff sees we’re taking action,” said Kevin St. Louis, who oversees the program in the U.N. Office of Human Resources Management. The third garnishment, from the salary of a top official in Geneva, began last week. So far, all the delinquent spouses have been men.

The new rules mean that Kpeli is finally getting some help in her effort to collect what she says is unpaid child support.

After she followed her husband from Ghana to his New York posting, Kpeli said he left her with two children--including one who has a serious medical condition--and little financial support. He continues to draw his U.N. family allowance and an additional stipend for his son’s special care, according to U.N. papers that Kpeli’s lawyer submitted to New York Family Court. But too much of that money stayed in his pocket, Kpeli said in a court claim for both unpaid support and an increase in the monthly amount.

“He got a divorce in Ghana without me, without my signature, without my knowledge,” Kpeli said recently.

The divorce decree included child support--but just over $100 a month, a livable sum in Ghana but a trifle in New York. For the sake of her son, who has hydrocephalus and depends on a permanent shunt to drain fluids from around his brain, she wants to stay in the U.S. “He needs the medical care of a developed country,” she said.

Enter the First Wives’ Club. About 40 women attend the monthly meetings across the street from the U.N. headquarters in New York.

“Divorce is devastating anywhere,” said Diana Boernstein, a former U.N. lawyer who helps guide the group. “But for spouses of U.N. members left behind in a foreign country, it can be especially bad. They are not allowed to work on a dependents visa, so they have no skills. They often can’t return to their home country because of the disgrace. And they can’t afford to stay here.”

The group refers them to Suzanne Colt, a tenacious lawyer appointed by the New York Family Court to deal with international child support cases.

Colt has chased down diplomats in the jungles of East Timor and Rwanda and the jumbled streets of Jordan to serve court orders demanding alimony and child support. In Rwanda, she appealed to the country’s deputy foreign minister for help delivering the papers to one husband, an official serving with the U.N. war crimes tribunal. The minister was only too glad to dish up justice, she said, to a man who was sitting in judgment of Rwanda’s 1994 ethnic massacres.

“He not only served the papers in person,” she said, “but when the husband refused to accept them, the minister threatened him with deportation.”

Success like that is sweet but rare.

Until May, the U.N. blocked access to personnel records that courts need to calculate support, fearing that such disclosures would open the organization to other legal challenges. “It’s a ludicrous hassle,” Colt said.

Even at the U.N. headquarters in New York or Geneva, “I have to do things I would never have to do with a private company,” she said.

“But it’s very rewarding when the money starts coming in and that’s the first check these women have seen.”