UN GATE / SDNY COURT, July 30 — This
morning brought the first straw poll on the tenth
Secretary-General, with Bahrain and Pakistan serving as
tellers and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as
July's Council President, to give a readout afterward.
Except this year, tellingly, there was
initially no way for anyone outside the building to hear
it. Unlike past straw polls, where the President's remarks
at the stakeout just outside the Council chamber were
carried on UNTV, this morning's schedule at webtv.un.org
showed nothing — meaning the readout would happen for
whoever is standing in that hallway, and for no one else.
In 2015, Inner City Press stood in that
hallway. This year, banned from the building for eight
years, it cannot, and now it appears neither can UNTV's
own cameras. So this morning, letters went out — to
France and the United Kingdom as permanent Council
members, to Pakistan and Bahrain as this morning's
tellers, to the Democratic Republic of the Congo as the
Council President who will give whatever readout there is,
and to Colombia, Greece, Latvia, Liberia, Panama, and
Somalia as the Council's other current members. Each was
asked the same two things: raise with the Council
presidency and the Department of Global Communications
that independent press access to this readout be restored,
and press MALU directly on Inner City Press's own pending
accreditation application, filed July 26 and still
sitting, per MALU's own words, merely "awaiting approval."
A UN Security Council that cannot say, this week, whether
the public will hear anything at all about its first vote
on the next Secretary-General is a Council that has
managed, in the space of one process, to make 2015 look
more transparent than 2026....
The letters may have done something:
unlike this morning's uncertainty, a UNTV camera was
present for the Democratic Republic of the Congo's readout
as July's Council President. But Ambassador Zénon Mukongo
Ngay declined to disclose the actual results of the first
straw poll — the vote count that, in 2015, Inner City
Press could get simply by standing in the hallway outside
the Council chamber and asking the delegates walking out.
This year, with X Live still nonfunctional after weeks of
unresolved platform problems, Inner City Press streamed
what coverage it could manage on YouTube instead, here.
What's missing is not incidental. In 2015,
being inside the building meant being able to ask a
delegate directly, off the cuff, what the numbers actually
were, even when the official readout was vague. Banned
from UN Headquarters for eight years, with an
accreditation application now five days old and still
"awaiting approval," Inner City Press cannot do that —
cannot catch an ambassador in the hallway, cannot ask a
follow-up, cannot press a source who might say more than
the President chose to. A camera being present is not the
same as the Council actually saying anything. On both
counts — access to the building, and now apparently the
substance of the readout itself — the process is less
transparent than it was a decade ago. The UN is getting
worse, not better, at exactly the moment it says it is
choosing who should lead it next.
Inner City Press has covered this
exact mechanism before — a decade ago, in 2016, when the
Council chose António Guterres.
The difference this time is not the
process. It's that Inner City Press can no longer walk
into the building to ask about it. In 2016, the
informal, non-binding straw polls ran through the summer
and fall: the first held July 21, with Japan's Ambassador
Koro Bessho, that month's rotating Council President,
telling Inner City Press directly that the results "will
be confidential. We'll see."
A third poll followed August 29, still
without colored ballots. Colored-ballot straw polls — a
later refinement in which the five veto-wielding permanent
members' preferences are specifically marked,
distinguishing their views from the other ten Council
members' — came further along in the process. Fourth and
fifth polls followed September 9 and 26, under New
Zealand's presidency, before Guterres emerged as the
choice that October.
At every one of those monthly presidency
handovers, Inner City Press was in the room, or in the
stakeout position outside the Council chamber, asking the
rotating president directly: will there be a press
stakeout after the closed-door consultation on the straw
poll? Can the process be made more transparent? On behalf
of the Free UN Coalition for Access, Inner City Press
pressed New Zealand's Ambassador Gerard van Bohemen on
exactly this in September 2016, alongside questions about
Burundi, Western Sahara, and the UN's failures in Juba.
The answers were often noncommittal —
"We'll see" was Bessho's own phrase for it — but the
questions were asked, in person, monthly, by a journalist
physically present to ask them again the next month if the
answer didn't hold. That access ended on July 3,
2018, when Inner City Press was physically removed from UN
Headquarters covering the Fifth (Budget) Committee, and
barred from re-entry two days later.
Eight years later, as the Security Council
prepares tomorrow's first straw poll on Guterres's
successor, Inner City Press cannot walk into the stakeout
position to ask this year's rotating president — Denmark,
for August — the same question it asked New Zealand and
Japan a decade ago. It can only write a letter, as it did
this week to Denmark's Permanent Representative, asking
that access to the August 3 briefing be arranged by WebEx,
and that Denmark's Presidency intervene with MALU on the
accreditation application still, per MALU's own words,
merely "awaiting approval."
The straw poll process itself remains
what it was in 2016: informal, confidential by the
Council's own description, run entirely behind closed
doors, with the public and press dependent entirely on
what leaks out or what a rotating president chooses to say
at a stakeout — assuming, this year, that the press is
even let in to reach one. For this first one, DRC seems to
so no color coding for P5 members. But the blocks and
vetos are in the air: US of Bachelet, China of Grossi,
we'll have more on this. For now, this
book.
Ten years ago, "we'll see" was an answer
given in person, to a question asked in person, with the
prospect of asking it again next month.
This year, "we'll see" is what Inner City
Press is left to say about whether anyone answers the
letters at all. Watch this site.
