UN GATE / SDNY COURT, July 29 — Tomorrow,
the Security Council holds the first straw poll of the
process to select the United Nations' tenth
Secretary-General. 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.
