Spain, the UN and the 45 million that complicate the complaint

The UN complaint against Spain and the 45-million-euro cheque

The Mediterranean graveyard has claimed thousands of lives this year, and a growing share of public opinion no longer wants the smugglers to be the only ones held responsible. It wants the Spanish Government to answer to the UN for the pull effect, the alleged abduction of minors and the deaths at sea. But one fact muddies the claim: Spain has paid more than 45 million euros to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the UN agency in charge of managing migration flows, which, according to published reports, has been led for fifteen years by the vvife of Agriculture Minister Luis Planas.

The conflict of interest nobody wants to see

The overlap of roles fuels suspicion. A strand of analysis argues that it is impossible to ask the UN to investigate Spain when one of its key agencies is run by the vvife of a member of the Spanish Government. This is not a conspiracy theory: the IOM has received tens of millions from Spain's general budgets in recent years, and the family link between its director, María Jesús Herrera Ceballos, and Minister Planas is a matter of public record. For critics, this explains the agency's "quiet activism" and turns the complaint into a joke.

Suing the one who pays? The international route under suspicion

Those pushing the complaint to the United Nations argue that the goal is less about securing a ruling than about forcing media visibility. A report, a resolution, a statement from a special rapporteur would force the Government to explain its migration policy in public. But scepticism is huge. The UN, others say, is not a neutral arbiter: it is a body of member states, and Spain sits in its General Assembly with the same rights as those who criticise it. Moreover, the structure of agencies and commissions is full of political appointments which, as in the IOM case, blur the line between migration management and institutional cronyism.

Meanwhile, the trickle of deaths continues and the accusations of child abduction find no judicial avenue in Spain. The question hanging in the air is whether the international route will achieve anything more than having the same people who write the police reports sit down to talk about protocols. If the complaint goes ahead, it will have to navigate an awkward fact: to hold the UN to account, the complainant would have to put in the dock the very agency that receives the complainant's money. And for now, the IOM keeps getting paid.