By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, October 25 – When UN Special Rapporteur David A. Kaye held a short press conference at the UN on October 25, he called for the UN to institute an access to information policy. Inner City Press asked him to specify what the UN Secretariat of Antonio Guterres can and should do on its own, without waiting for or blaming the General Assembly. Inner City Press also asked him about the UN new October 20 threat to review its accreditation, including for ill-defined violations on an unspecified date on the UN's 38th floor. Video here.
Kaye said the Secretariat can act on FOIA, while educating and bringing the General Assembly along. He called unsatisfactory the UN's previous response to his inquiry about the eviction of Inner City Press (for covering an event in the same UN Press Briefing Room Kaye spoke in). Kaye said he looks forward to speaking with new (seven week) head of the Department of Public Information Alison Smale.
Fine - but the October 20 threat was issued under Smale, and she has still not responded to two petitions to her in September to reverse 20 months of restrictions and restore Inner City Press to its long-time shared work space, currently assigned to a no-show, no-question Egyptian state media, Akhbar al Yom, which came in only for "faux pooling" of Guterres meeting with Sisi, here. We'll have more on all that. Kaye field questions about BBC in Iran, Trump and citing a lack of mobility for journalists in Japan, on which we may have more.
The UN delivered a threat to Inner City Press to “review” it accreditation on Friday afternoon at 5 pm. The UN official who signed the letter, when Inner City Press went to ask about the undefined violation of live-streaming Periscope video at a photo op by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, had already left, minutes after sending the threat. This comes two days after Inner City Press asked Guterres about the UN inaction on threatened genocide in Cameroon, and the UN claimed Guterres hadn't heard the 15-second long question.
It also comes after Alison Smale the head of the Department of Public Information which would “review” Inner City Press' accreditation has ignored three separatepetitions from Inner City Press in the six weeks she has been in the job, urging her to remove restrictions on Inner City Press' reporting which hinder its coverage of the UN's performance in such crises as Yemen, Kenya,Myanmar, and the Central African Republic where Guterres travels next week, with Smale's DPI saying its coverage of the trip will be a test of its public relations ability. But the UN official who triggered the complaint is Maher Nasser, who filled in for Smale before she arrived.
UN's Letter Threatening to Review Inner City Press' Accreditation for Audio Report While Staking Out on Cam... by Matthew Russell Lee on Scribd
His complaint is that audio of what he said to Inner City Press as it staked out the elevators in the UN lobby openly recording, as it has for example with Cameroon's Ambassador Tommo Monthe, here, was similarly published.
A UN “Public Information” official is complaining about an article, and abusing his position to threaten to review Inner City Press' accreditation. The UN has previously been called out for targeting Inner City Press, and for having no rules or due process. But the UN is entirely UNaccountable, impunity on censorship as, bigger picture, on the cholera it brought to Haiti. And, it seems, Antonio Guterres has not reformed or reversed anything. This threat is from an official involved in the last round of retaliation who told Inner City Press on Twitter to be less "negative" about the UN - amid inaction on the mass killing in Cameroon - and who allowed pro-UN hecking of Inner City Press' questions about the cholera the UN brought to Haiti and the Ng Lap Seng /John Ashe UN bribery scandal which resulted in six guilty verdicts. We'll have more on this.
