Diplomats who abuse their immunity from prosecution to keep their “imported” domestic workers as virtual slaves are a repeated scandal. What has not gained as much media coverage and public exposure is the flagrant abuse of sovereign immunity by international organizations.
For decades, the World Bank, the third largest employer in our nation’s capital, has sustained racially discriminatory practices. And within the last few months an appeal to address the issue has seen inaction by the newest president of the World Bank, appointed in 2010 by President Obama.
In 2009, the Government Accountability Project identified only four black Americans out of more than 1000 American professionals working at the bank, not counting several thousand foreign nationals. The bank’s reply essentially was that there are not sufficient qualified black Americans.
