¹ú²úAV

UNAT held that the case was distinguishable from Finniss (judgment No. 2014-UNAT-397) since there was no allegation of bias, discrimination, or any other kind of deteriorated or privileged relationship between the involved candidate and the Deputy CEO. UNAT disagreed with UNDT’s holding that the Deputy CEO should not have acted as a voting member of the assessment panel. UNAT held that in order to exclude the Deputy CEO’s involvement in the selection exercise, there must be reasonable grounds and/or evidence of extraneous or improper motives, of which there was none (except unsubstantiated and inconsequential rumours). UNAT held that the selection process had a built-in safeguard mechanism to keep any individual bias and preformulated opinion from influencing the selection exercise, which included two members of the assessment panel being external to UNJSPF, a staff member from the Office of Human Resources Management sitting on the panel ex officio making a recommendation to the CEO, who took the ultimate decision. UNAT held that the other circumstantial factors considered by the UNDT as possible indicators of deficiency in the selection exercise were not, by themselves, capable of invalidating, the selection process. UNAT held that UNDT erred in law when it concluded that the Appellant was not afforded full and fair consideration for the position. UNAT upheld the appeal and vacated the UNDT judgment.