Pramila Patten: ‘It’s Not My Job’

Pramila Patten is U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ special representative on sexual violence in conflict zones. She recently made quite a stir by submitting a report to Guterres, placing Israel on a blacklist, right beside Hamas, for “sexual violence,” including the preposterous charge that Israeli prison guards trained dogs to sexually assault Palestinian prisoners.

There has never been any evidence presented to support such a charge; only the accusations from Palestinians who apparently want to provide an alternative narrative about sexual violence they claim to have suffered, given what Hamas did to Israelis on October 7. 2023. In those attacks, sexual assaults were not tangential, but central to, the atrocities that Hamas carried out on Israeli men, women, and children. Girls were gang-raped and then stabbed in their vaginas; women had their breasts sliced off; men had their genitalia cut off and stuffed into their mouths; family members were forced to have sex with each other, before being murdered, a tableau which the Hamas killers found hilarious. The evidence for that comes from the mutilated corpses, with sex organs cut out or cut off, from the boasts by Hamas members themselves, made in calls home to Gaza, from the videos they made of their atrocities; and from eyewitness accounts from Israelis able to peep out from their “safe rooms” at the barbaric scenes outside.

More on Pramila Patten’s report, and her denial that she ought to have verified those reports of sexual violence by the IDF before submitting them, can be found here: “‘Not My Job’: UN Official Says Did Not Review Evidence Before Blacklisting Israel for Sex-Crimes Alongside Hamas,” i24 News, May 30, 2026:

A senior UN official whose report placed Israel on a sexual-violence blacklist alongside Hamas admitted she had not personally reviewed the evidence before accusing Israeli bodies of sex crimes against Palestinian detainees.

Pramila Patten, the UN secretary-general’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, made the admission after her office included Israeli security bodies in a report on conflict-related sexual violence.

“I made it clear to Israel I would not visit any detention facility, even if offered. It’s not the responsibility of my office to do any verification,” she said at a press conference, replying to a question. “The information is verified with a very robust methodology of verification and documentation. I am a recipient. I compile that information and I present it to the Secretary-General.”

She didn’t want to visit Israeli prisons, she didn’t want to verify charges made against Israel herself, because she felt she could rely on “a very robust methodology of verification and documentation.” But how was that “verification” process performed? Why did she have such faith in it? And why are those pesky Israelis trying to confuse her with facts?

Pramila Patten thinks she should send on to Secretary-General Guterres claims about Israeli guards sexually abusing Palestinian prisoners, including the phantasmagoric claim that the Israeli guards “train dogs to rape Palestinians,” without attempting her own verification. She’s not interested in finding out the truth of the matter: make any claim you want, no matter how absurd, about Israel, and Pramila Patten will be happy to pass it on to Antonio Guterres.

Further probed whether she saw the evidence with her eyes, Patten replied “no, because it’s not my job.”

Really? I would have thought going to Israel to view whatever evidence there was to support the charge that Israeli prison guards committed sexual assault was a most important part of her job.

Pramila Patten, explaining why she didn’t bother to visit Israel to interrogate both the Palestinian prisoners making the explosive charges about security guards training dogs to sexually assault them, and the Israeli officials who vigorously deny those charges, had only one thing to say in defense of her failure to vet the sources of such a claim: “It’s not my job.” She’s the official who reports directly to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as the UN special representative on sexual violence in conflict zones. But why should Patten travel all the way to Israel to do some investigating of her own when it is so much easier to pass on the sensational charges of others without making any judgement of her own as to their veracity? Those four words ought to serve as her epitaph, “It’s not my job.”