By Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon
BBC - Guardian UK - Honduras - ESPN
UN GATE, Dec 1 – With Niger taking over presidency of the UN Security Council on December 1, on November 30 Inner City Press wrote to the Niger Mission to the UN to request access to its December 1 press conference by Ambassador Abdou Abarryon.
Inner City Press wrote to the Mission including at nigermission [at] ymail [dot] com
More than a day later, nothing - inconsistent, to say the least, with Niger's duty as President of the UN Security Council.
Their "program of work" has NOTHING on Cameroon or Nigeria, but small arms and exclusion. No Burma, no Haiti - and nothing at all, from December 21 on. We will be covering this month, censored or not, in detail.
Inner City Press covered the UN and UNSC under Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon then was thrown out under Antonio Guterres after asking him directly about [among other things including Cameroon,] the omission from his financial disclosure covering 2016 of his link, through Lisbon's Gulbenkian Foundation which paid him money, to convicted UN briber CEFC China Energy.
This was and is a legitimate journalistic question however Inner City Press has been banned by Guterres and his USG Melissa Fleming.
There is no commitment by the UN Secretariat to even respond to a polite law firm letter seeking access to Inner City Press, see video. See also Press Freedom Tracker and The Independent (UK)
The Niger Mission and Niger have a duty to not collude in censorship, and to take questions from media. Inner City Press is permitted (in fact, invited) to put WebEx questions to the IMF briefings, see below, and is accredited at the SDNY Federal court here in New York.
So it is up to Niger and the Niger Mission to provide access.
Watch this site.
***
Your support means a lot. As little as $5 a month helps keep us going and grants you access to exclusive bonus material on our Patreon page. Click here to become a patron.
