Saturday, February 2, 2013

UN Demands Posting of Its Views on Board It Won't Permit, UNCA Kills 1st Amendment Under US Lawyer Pamela Falk


By Matthew Russell Lee
 
UNITED NATIONS, February 2 -- The UN is so infused with double standards that its official either cannot see, or will not acknowledge, them.

  On Friday afternoon UN Department of Public Information official Stephane Dujarric e-mailed a series of bureaucratic (non) answers to press freedom questions posed more than two weeks before. He concluded, "I would appreciate you posting this email in full."

  Four hours later Dujarric replied to a letter addressed to his boss and DPI chief Peter Launsky-Tieffenthal and showing that the responses were totally unsatisfactory and that Dujarric because of his murky role in previous dis-accreditation attempts was and is not the right interlocutor (a good UN word, that, but apparently not understood by DPI in this case).

  Ignoring the critique, Dujarric insisted, "I would appreciate, as asked in my email to you earlier today, that you publish my answers in full on Inner City Press and/or FUNCA."

   FUNCA is the Free UN Coalition for Access, which was launched on December 7, 2012 to defend the rights of journalists at and from the UN, since the long-time and now decayed UN Correspondents Association not only does not defend, but in 2012 affirmatively attacked, the rights of the investigative Press at the UN.

   All that said, Dujarric ignored a basic request FUNCA made to him -- or really to his boss Peter Launsky-Tieffenthal, who has yet to respond.

 Just as UNCA has a bulletin board in the UN press area -- UNCA used its glassed-in board to leave posted for months in 2012 a letter denouncing Inner City Press -- the new FUNCA either must be permitted to post flyers on an unbranded UN Journalists board, or to have a bulletin board of its own, to echo a movie title.

   This right to equal treatment is not an abstraction. Inner City Press already published the wan January 24 letter to Dujarric and Launsky-Tieffenthal signed by UNCA's new president, Pamela S. Falk of CBS, here.

  After Inner City Press published it, UNCA hastily posted its letter on its glassed in bulletin board, which is right next to Pamela Falk's CBS office (which, unlike others' cubicles, is enclosed and private).

   So where is the UN's response to UNCA's and Falk's letter? Is the UN asking Falk to post it as well? On the bulletin board that it allows only UNCA, but no one else, to have, as in a one-party state?

 Friday UNCA's / Falk's glassed in board had her letter to DPI, but no response. Free UN Coalition for Access flyers, including next to the board and CBS door, had been torn down. The day previous, the flyers were torn down off the door to Inner City Press' cubicle. Posting, indeed.

  It's worth noting that Pamela Falk has in the past often said to Inner City Press, "I am a lawyer."

  She is an American -- this is eminently clear in questions asked -- and so presumably aware of the First Amendment to the US Constitution.

  The free speech right to post flyers in the UN critical of the UN, and to equal treatment between groups like UNCA and FUNCA, is First Amendment 101. So where is Pam Falk? Watch this site.