By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, March 1 – UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has been on the road for more than a week.
He met with the ruling families of the United Arab Emirates (but didn't raise their banning of a professor who's a critic of Bahrain) and Qatar (but didn't raise the sentencing to 15 years in prison of a poet who dared criticize them).
On Monday March 4 Ban's New York scheduled resumes, and guess who's on it? Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch, who back in May 2011 refused to provide the Press with even a summary of what issues he and HRW were RAISING in their meeting with Ban Ki-moon.
Inner City Press asked Roth's UN lobbyist Philippe Bolopion, then and again in December 2012, if only big money donors get this information from HRW, without substantive response.
Bolopion told Inner City Press, copying Ken Roth, that "to preserve our ability to have frank discussions with UN officials and advance our advocacy goals, we don't typically communicate on the content of discussions we have with them."
So what WILL Roth raise to Ban on Monday? One assumes, from Roth's prolific tweets, that he will urge Ban to call for a complete cut off in dealings with Rwanda because of the M23 rebels.
Inner City Press has repeated asked Roth and other HRW big wigs to state their position on UN Peacekeeping boss Herve Ladsous' move to use drones, without response. Would that be on the agenda?
When HRW retweeted Reed Brody on Haiti's Duvalier finally facing some of his victims in court, Inner City Press asked for HRW's and Roth's position on Ban Ki-moon's terse dismissal after 15 months of the claims for the UN bringing cholera into Haiti.
Again, no response from HRW. Might that at least be on the agenda? They won't answer Inner City Press for whatever reason. But perhaps others will ask, or they will simply say, before and after the meeting. Watch this site.
