On UNGA Day 1 Guterres Demands Accountability From Everyone But Himself

On UNGA Day 1 Guterres Demands Accountability From Everyone But Himself by Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Book Substack UN GATE / SDNY, Sept 22 – For this 2026 UN General Assembly, the last of Antonio Guterres' desultory tenure, Inner City Press banned by Guterres applied on July 25 to re-enter and cover the speeches and section of next UNSG. No response. On September 20 UN Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric had Inner City Press removed even from a Zoom briefing, video here.    So Inner City Press will cover it from the gate. On September 22 Secretary-General António Guterres delivered his final address. It is worth reading against what his own office has actually done with power over the past eight years — starting with his banning of the Press, which he has never once, in a decade of speeches about transparency, addressed.  Guterres told the Assembly: "We must defend the Charter without double standards." He has never explained, in any format, why Inner City Press has been barred from UN Headquarters since July 2018 — dragged out by his own Department of Safety and Security while covering a budget committee meeting, with no hearing held and no appeal ever granted. Whatever standard justified that exclusion has never been stated; whatever standard would end it has never been offered either. A Secretary-General who invokes "no double standards" from a podium the banned journalist is not permitted to sit near is demonstrating, rather than rebutting, the very double standard he warns against.  He went further: "We must... demand accountability without fear or favour." The Secretariat's own accountability to the press it covers daily — MALU's response to Inner City Press's most recent accreditation application was a single sentence confirming receipt, "not a confirmation of approval," and nothing since — apparently falls outside the accountability Guterres has in mind. It is accountability demanded of everyone else, from a building that has spent eight years demonstrating none of its own.  On his dubious UN80 reform initiative, Guterres promised an organization "more transparent... more disciplined with resources... more present where people need us." When staff ask questions, they face retaliation. Now in the UN, at podium banner of 3 media from White House four days and counting. On dais above him, UNSG @AntonioGuterres who has banned Inner City Press for nearly his entire tenure, to avoid inquiry into his links with UN-briber CEFC China Energy & now Huawei https://t.co/kM6wCsObiD pic.twitter.com/KchTBbSbsP — Inner City Press (@innercitypress) September 22, 2026 Whatever transparency UN80 has delivered, it has not reached the specific, standing question this outlet has posed for years: who decided to ban a journalist, on what basis, and why has that decision never been reviewed. An institution cannot credibly claim to be building transparency in the abstract while declining, concretely, to explain its own oldest unresolved press-access case.  The speech's most quietly damning line may be the one about artificial intelligence, aimed at everyone but himself: "Decision-making without transparency" is precisely what Guterres named as "the danger." He was describing AI systems. He could as easily have been describing his MALU under Melissa Fleming.   And on the substance, stripped of the rhetoric: Guterres himself conceded, of Gaza, "a scale of killing and destruction unlike anything I have witnessed in all my years as Secretary-General" — an admission, on his own telling, that the worst catastrophe of his tenure occurred on his own watch, under an institution he has spent a decade insisting is indispensable to preventing exactly that. Security Council reform, which he has called for since his first year in office, remains exactly where it was: "Africa still has no permanent representation on the Council," a decade after he first said it should.  He closes his tenure telling the Assembly he will "never... ever give up." On the ban that has now outlasted nearly his entire Secretary-Generalship, he never started. Watch this site. Newly on the September 22 speakers list is Croatia, here on UN corruption, just before Guterres had Inner City Press roughed up and banned: UN Briber Patrick Ho In Appeal Reveals More Lobbying In UN For China Met Croatia President No Audit (July 13, 2019) — In appeal filings, convicted UN briber Patrick Ho's lobbying activities on China's behalf were shown to have included a meeting with Croatia's president, part of a broader pattern the underlying UN audit failed to capture. Watch this site. More on X for Subscribers here & Substack here *** Your support means a lot. 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