By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, December 12 -- While the UN continues to preach transparency, democracy and even lack of censorship around the world, in elections held last and this December inside the UN, decay was the rule.
And the UN Secretariat's goal was the same: to find friendly interlocutors who won't say when the Emperor has no clothes.
For the UN Staff Union, a letter went to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon today protesting his failure to recognize the Staff Union and its voting results last December -- essentially, breaking the Union.
Meanwhile Ban' office props up as interlocutor on media issues the "United Nations Correspondents Association," a group whose Executive Board members sought to get the investigative Press thrown out, and now happily play softball soccer with Ban.
It's become the UN's Censorship Alliance, with the censor in chief returned, charging $100 and more to hear an Italian tenor sing - of Haiti but not the cholera the UN brought -- in an old bank building in Manhattan. This is how the UN rots.
Here's from today's letter to Ban Ki-moon, which Inner City Press witnessed being delivered to various UN offices on the morning of December 11, 2014:
Mr. Secretary-General,
You may be aware that the Office of Legal Affairs approved the Staff Union’s Statute and Regulations on behalf of the Secretary-General in 2007, consistent with the provisions of Staff Regulation 8.1(b), which mirrors the principles of Article 21(3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The actions of your Administration in denying official recognition to the elected staff representatives and executive leadership of the 45th Staff Council represent a flagrant and wilful abuse of authority and utter disregard for Staff Regulations 8.1(a) and (b) and the basic human rights of the staff in New York Headquarters to freely elect their representatives. It is time to correct your Administration's insidious choice of the desirable "staff representatives" with whom to engage in New York. Never in the history of the United Nations has any Administration undermined the systemic and institutional practices and processes that ensure that the Secretary-General and the staff, through their elected representatives, can continuously engage in constructive dialogue.
I call upon you, as Chief Administrative Officer of the United Nations, to correct this injustice and to restore ethical behaviour to your Administration by instructing the USG/DM to grant with immediate effect time release and facilities to the elected members of the 45th Staff Council and its executive leadership, as determined by the electorate through free and fair elections last December.
Inner City Press for the new Free UN Coalition for Access asked Ban Ki-moon's spokesman Stephane Dujarric about the letter and its argument on December 12; Dujarric said he would check into it. Watch this site.
