Recently, UNDP introduced legal aid for justice, an initiative designed to provide comprehensive support to legal aid systems across different regions, using the UN principles and guidelines on access to legal aid in criminal justice systems as its foundation.
A recent report from UNDP found that the main barriers experienced by women, people with disabilities and minorities are: widespread poverty, discrimination, public prejudice, low education, and illiteracy.
As a result, according to a 2009 UNDP study only 18% of disabled girls attend school in Solomon Islands, compared to 37% of non-disabled girls.
"We are always helping organisations like UNDP and UNICEF to write reports and give recommendations, but it never amounts to anything," says an exasperated Savina.
Based on a recent UNDP analysis of national studies (pdf) carried out in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan and Serbia during 2011-12, is is fair to say that there are institutional capacity and knowledge gaps in judicial institutions to address the needs of specific segment of population: women, minorities, persons with disabilities.
As far as "substantive responses" go, within 24 hours of the piece being posted online, Mr Minh, Mr Sombath's counterpart from the UNDP side, had been pressured to disown his role in the story.
An Albanian ex-manager of UNDP operations in Pyongyang, Artjon Shkurtaj, claims to have been victimised after blowing the whistle on abuses.
They complain that American officials have fed copious details of their agency's alleged misdeeds in North Korea to the press, to Congress and to other UN missions while those same officials have made it hard for the UNDP to defend or correct itself, by refusing to give the agency any incriminating documents that detail what it is supposed to have done wrong.
The ever-cheerful UNDP said in 1999 that the basins of the Nile, Niger, Volta and Zambezi were all potential flashpoints.
This was "elegantly simple" (and certainly a bit simplistic) yet radical, and by shifting the focus of the debate it led to some dramatic changes in development policy around the world, concludes Helen Clark, the current head of the UNDP, in the 20th Anniversary issue of the report.
Unless this changes, the Timorese will remain, as the UNDP puts it, politically free but chained by poverty.
