By
Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED
NATIONS, November 5 -- When Ban Ki-moon was selected as UN Secretary
General in 2006 it was an untransparent process, with secret ballots
in the Security Council.
The Permanent Five members used a different
color, but their vetoes were not even attributable to them. In this
way, the least controversial -- or most servile -- candidate emerged.
Now
a group of civil society organizations have written a letter to the
UN member states in the General Assembly, urging that the process to
replace Ban in 2016 be more transparent, be at least to some degree
based on merit.
The signatories include Avaaz, Amnesty International,
CIVICUS, Equality Now, FEMNET, Forum-Asia, Global Policy Forum,
Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, Social Watch, Third World
Network, Women’s Environment and Development Organization, the
World Federalist Movement-Institute for Global Policy and the World
Federation of United Nations Associations.
While
the new Free UN Coalition for Access, formed in response to the
decline in media access and transparency generally under Ban Ki-moon,
heartily agrees with the need to reform and improve the Secretary
General selection process.
Candidates so far including Helen Clark of
UNDP, who virtually never takes press questions while in New York,
the headquarters of UNDP, amid untransparent layoffs, and director
general of UNESCO, an agency which this week led an event about
journalists at which not a single question from a journalist was
taken.
One
reason for the decline in transparency at the UN in recent years is
the transformation of the in-house “UN Correspondents Association”
into a servile appendage of Ban Ki-moon's Secretariat. UNCA's
executive committee held a supposedly “on the record” lunch with
Ban Ki-moon but refused to provide the transcript or audio file even
to its own members afterward.
Tellingly,
after September's General Assembly debate week, UNCA's “complaints”
to Ban's Secretariat are to ask for fewer events, for a private wi-fi
network for in-house UN journalist and not those who cover to cover
the week, and a booklet co-signed with Ban.
Meanwhile,
UNCA makes no mention of restrictions of access that week such as the
French mission ordering all non-French journalists out of the UN's
Press Briefing Room, and UN Peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous
physically blocking the Press' camera, Vine here.
The new Free UN Coalition for Access has raised these issues, publicly, in fliers and in the UN's Press Briefing Room. Tellingly, the UN Secretariat appears ready to limit its
"interlocutors" on media access to the very insiders at UNCA who have
overseen and promoted the decline in access. It's the UN Censorship
Alliance.
Now
things at set to get even worse at UNCA, as annointed to return to
head the group is Giampaolo Pioli, who mis-used his previous
presidency to order the removal from the Internet of an Inner City
Press article reporting that he had rented one of his Manhattan
apartments to Sri Lanka's Permanent Representative, then screened a
Sri Lankan government film denying war crimes in the UN's Dag
Hammerskjold Library Auditorium, under the UNCA banner, without
checking with or informing even UNCA's Executive Board members.
When
his censorship attempt was rebuffed, Pioli said he would get Inner
City Press thrown out of the UN. Such a letter went in to UN Media
Accreditation, from UNCA's then board member at Voice of America.
A
subsequent Freedom of Information Act request -- VOA is US state
media -- found that UNCA had met “quietly” with the UN about it,
and said AFP and Reuters supported it. (Reuters later got Google to
ban one of its complaints to the UN from Google's Search, mis-using
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, here.)
An
analogy that some have now made: it's one thing that Kurt Waldheim
was UN Secretary General once. But what would it say about the UN if
he were to return, after a haitus, for more time atop the
organization?
And
while even the process that picked Ban had multiple candidates, in
the UNCA process there is rarely any competition. In this case,
outgoing UNCA president Pamela Falk, under whose figurehead tenure
media access declined, has explicitly endorsed the return of Pioli as
her successor. This is decay.
Ban
Ki-moon, meanwhile, is appearing in polls as running for president of
his native South Korea in 2017. Inner City Press asked Ban's deputy
spokesperson about it, who said Ban is “currently” focused on his
current job. This has been repeated in South Korea, here. The UN is
being used; the UN is in further decline; there are moves afoot to
stem the tide of decay. Watch this site.
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