By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, July 17 -- There will be a lot of talk about the protection of journalists at the UN today, and Inner City Press will cover it from all sides, including from the perspective of how things actually work at the UN.
In 2012 the representatives of Reuters, Agence France Presse, Voice of America and others, using the UN Correspondents Association which they control, repeatedly tried to get the investigative Press thrown out of the UN.
Voice of America wrote to the UN on June 20, 2012, asking that the accreditation of Inner City Press be “reviewed.” Click here for that document.
In documents Inner City Press obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act since VOA is a US government organ, VOA said it had the support of Reuters, Agence France Presse and UNCA itself.
(FOIA requests have been filed concerning the anonymous social media campaign begun within the Executive Committee of UNCA which is still active this week.)
Agence France Presse's Tim Witcher, after first complaining within the UNCA Executive Committee about a story Inner City Press published about Herve Ladsous, the fourth Frenchman in a row to head UN Peacekeeping, this year went further.
Witcher filed a complaint with UN Security leading with how Inner City Press asked a question to Ladsous about the lack of accountability for the 135 rapes in Minova by the UN's partners in the Congolese Army.
Part of this pattern of attempts to discourage or prohibit investigative reporting in the UN) by its UN Censorship Alliance was a demand that Inner City Press remove from the internet its reporting about Sri Lanka military figures using UNCA exclusive “right” to hold briefings inside the UN to deny detailed charges of war crimes committed in 2009, and facts relevant to why this took place.
Sri Lanka is a country where journalist who question the government are threatened with death, and after the UNCA Executive Committee's proceeding and leaks, the death threats reached the Press in New York. But the UNCA Executive Committee, even informed, kept right on going. Protection of journalists?
UNCA leadership's self-serving and unaccountable use of the the three room on the third floor that the UN gives it continues under UNCA's 2013 president Pamela Falk.
Falk took photographs of a March 18, 2013 non-consensual raid on Inner City Press' office and, when asked why she took photographs, issued a legal threat to “cease and desist” reporting on it, through her CBSNews.com e-mail address. Protection of journalists, indeed.
Reuters' Louis Charbonneau, then as now the first vice president of UNCA and power behind the dubious thrown, filed stealth complaints and worse.
Charbonneau immediately gave to the UN's top accreditation official an internal document that he and the other Executive Committee members had promised three minutes before would remain only inside UNCA. Click here for document, here for story.
Click here for audio of the UNCA Executive Committee meeting where Charbonneau said the document would remain only within UNCA -- three minutes before he sent it to the UN's top accreditation official with the notation, "you didn't get this from me."
As such, Reuters' Charbonneau and the UNCA Executive Committee came to function in essence as spies or informants for the UN, which was given (and retained for later use) documents explicitly labeled as internal to UNCA. Some are not surprised that the flow, then, works that other way as well.
As to UNCA, once it is definitely shown that their supposedly internal documents were immediately handed to the UN's top accreditation official, something had to happen. Even the UN goes through the motions in the face of such revelations. But not UNCA.
There is much more to say, but the point for now is this: some of the talk about protection of journalists held at the UN today and others days is shot full of hypocrisy.
Add to this that the anonymous social media campaign begun within the Executive Committee of UNCA -- now known due to its anonymous trolling nature as the UN Cowardice Association -- is active still this week.
This stands in contrast to the on-the-record work of Inner City Press, and the Free UN Coalition for Access which it co-founded in order to actually protect journalists from these and other attacks -- click here for example for FUNCA members' work in Somaliland, a place where the UN and Security Council are not protecting journalists, far from it.
And the UN Secretariat's recent response? To threaten to “suspend or withdraw” the accreditation of Inner City Press for merely hanging the sign of the Free UN Coalition for Access on door of room S-303, one story up from the Security Council. Just is just one story. Watch this site.
