By Matthew Russell Lee
|www.innercitypress.com/unngo1credentials111609.html
UNITED NATIONS, November 16 -- Eleven days after a non-governmental organization's representative had her UN identification pass taken away for speaking at the General Assembly stakeout microphone, UN Associate Spokesperson Farhan Haq was asked if her credentials had been restored.
"There's been no removal of the credentials of Ms. Bayefsky or her organization," Haq claimed, on camera. Video here, from Minute 17. But a simply phone call to Ms. Bayefsky reveals that her I.D. card, required to gain access to the UN complex, has not been returned. [Click here for Inner City Press' first exclusive report of Ms. Bayefsky's ejection from the UN.]
Ms. Bayefsky told Inner City Press of that after her pass was confiscated by UN Security, she was asked to draft and sign a written statement, after which her pass would be returned to her. She spent more than two hours writing the statement, and included in it a comment by a UN Security official that "the Palestinian Observer was very upset" at what she had said at the microphone, after the Assembly's vote on the Goldstone report about Gaza.
Then, Ms. Bayefsky say, the UN through Security official Anne Hammenrudh no longer wanted her to sign or turn in the statement. Rather, she was told that the matter would be referred to the Assembly's Committee on Non Governmental Organizations, which doesn't meet until the end of January. [Click here for previous Inner City Press coverage of the Committee on NGOs.]
So while Ms. Bayefsky is, for now, barred from the UN for the rest of the year, UN Spokesperson Farhan Haq says "her credentials are not changed" and "there's been no removal of credentials."
And see, www.innercitypress.com/unngo1credentials111609.html
