UN GATE, Aug 19 – Ivonne A-Baki, an
Ecuadorian diplomat and former cabinet minister nominated
by Tonga, has become the latest declared candidate for the
tenth Secretary-General of the United Nations, filing an
official vision statement titled "Renewing the United
Nations."
She also filed a boiler plate campaign
finance statement, "public and private" without details.
While in the UN, Inner City Press pushed for just such
disclosures. Now banned by outgoing SG Guterres, after
reporting he neglected to include in his finance
disclosure his funds from Gulbenkian Foundation, then
trying to sell its oil company to briber China Energy Fund
Committee, Inner City Press will have to cover the August
19 (Olara Otunno) and August 20 (A-Baki) UNGA Q&A
sessions from outside.
A-Baki's statement opens with
a personal note, on sheltering with her three children
under bombardment in Beirut four decades ago, a moment she
says shaped a lifelong commitment to peacemaking, and
cites her direct role negotiating the 1998 Ecuador-Peru
border settlement, one of the last interstate wars
resolved in South America, as the credential she brings to
the office. A-Baki's platform rests on five stated
commitments: rebalancing the UN toward conflict prevention
and mediation rather than reactive peacekeeping, whose
deployed personnel have fallen from roughly 107,000 in
2015 to about 61,000 today even as global conflict counts
hit their highest level since 1946; Security Council
reform to add permanent seats for Africa, Latin America,
and Asia, while declining to name which specific states
should hold them; sovereign debt relief for developing
nations, an issue she frames through her own record
leading Ecuador's Yasuni-ITT Initiative and its subsequent
debt-for-nature conversion; a UN role as convener, not
regulator, on AI governance, building on the Global
Digital Compact; and internal UN reform of what she calls
an institution that has become "slow, fragmented and
expensive," citing the Secretariat's own 40,000-plus
accumulated mandates and the Organization's 2025 liquidity
crisis, in which roughly $1.8 billion in assessed
contributions went unpaid. Nothing, at least not
yet, on ending UN censorship of independent press.
Below, Inner City Press's coverage
of the earlier candidates' debate. Watch this site for
A-Baki's own appearance before member states on August 20.
Six candidates for the top job
at the United Nations stood on a stage in the General
Assembly Hall on July 23, in a "town hall" moderated not
by the UN press corps (corpse) but by Bloomberg
television, presented as the exclusive media partner of
General Assembly President Annalena Baerbock. Can you say,
corporate capture?
Inner City Press, banned from UN
premises since 2018 for its reporting on the UN's own
budget corruption, was therefore not among those permitted
to ask a question. Nor, notably, was any question asked by
anyone about UN press access, transparency, or
accountability — ninety minutes on peace, reform, AI, and
trade, and not once did the moderators or the hand-picked
audience members ask a single candidate how they would
treat journalists the UN itself has shut out, or for
example Haitians killed by the cholera the UN brought
there, or UN victims from DRC to Colombia.
What was asked, and answered, is
instructive in what it reveals and what it evades.
Rafael Mariano Grossi, the IAEA Director-General whose
organization Inner City Press has separately reported
is linkned to an anonymous social media account praising
his own candidacy, @GrossiForNextUN,that now blocks Inner
City Press, insisted that "impartiality is one of the most
difficult traits of the job of the Secretary-General,
which is not indifference." Pressed on autonomous weapons
and AI, Grossi offered, "A verification system of the type
that you have for nuclear weapons... would be an illusion"
— so would UN accountability. Grossi has not answered the
questionnaire
of the Free UN Coalition for Access (FUNCA) and Inner City
Press, nor explained the sock puppet X accounts that
support him.
Michelle Bachelet, twice President
of Chile and twice a senior UN official, who heard Inner
City Press' critique at the stakeout under the stairway by
the Vienna cafe and did nothing about it, selling out
Uighurs and others,
built her opening entirely on her own resume, rattling off
First... second... third. It is said she would be vetoed.
That was not directly asked, much less answered. Nor has
she answered the Inner City Press questionnaire. Now
Google's Gemini says she say withdrawn...
Rebecca Grynspan, formerly UNCTAD chief,
reached out for the term "polylateralism" and cited her
own brokering of the Black Sea Initiative grain deal as
her template for the Strait of Hormuz. She did not mention
misusing
a Lear Jet in Afghanistan travel, much less the
ongoing Press ban.
MarÃa Fernanda Espinosa, herself a former
President of the General Assembly who refused
to answer when the Press was banned, said that
"today, 72 member states have not yet paid their dues,"
then quoted Elie Wiesel, with moderators repeatedly saying
only "please wrap it up." She has not answered Inner City
Press' questionnaire, nor its at-tweets. She did a YouTube
"interview" that took no questions; nor has says answered
Press questions @-ed at her on X.
Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, Guyana's
ambassador who as UNSC President refused not only Inner
City Press' written
questions but also its request to know why it was
banned, asked what she'd want the world to say after any
first term, says "that we would have seen that a woman as
Secretary-General can deliver."
Macky Sall, Senegal's former president who
had a hidden wasteful budget, bragged of his own trip to
meet Vladimir Putin at the height of the Ukraine war's
grain blockade, "because I represented a continent of 1.5
billion people" affected by it. Fittingly, he compared the
UN to a pipe organ and himself to "an organist" who could
"play music beautifully on behalf of member states."
Organist indeed. Otunnu had not joined in, or arrived in
New York, yet.
What none of the six was asked, by
Bloomberg's moderators or by the single NGO
representative, single selected staff member, nor handful
of vetted ambassadors given the floor, was anything about
the Organization's own transparency: not about press
credentialing, not about the eight years Inner City Press
has spent seeking reinstatement after reporting on Budget
Committee corruption, not about bringing cholera to Haiti
and paying nothing, repatriating raping peacekeepers with
no punishment, not about unfair promotion of cronies, lack
of whistleblower protections, pure waste.
Grynspan put the imit of the
whole exercise, its contempt for We the People's,
plainly: "It is for the Security Council and Member States
to decide who is the best person to lead this task."
Ninety minutes of television, moderated by a corporate
media partner, changes nothing about who actually picks
the tenth Secretary-General of the United Nations. That
decision, as ever, will be made somewhere Inner City Press
is not permitted to be. But we will continue reporting -
including under whoever "wins." More candidates are
needed, and at end to UN censorship. Watch this site.
