Inner City Press -- Investigative Reporting From the Inner City to Wall Street to the United Nations

As Ban Ki-moon Moves For 2d UN Term, Human Rights Groups Go Silent To Keep Access, Press Controlled

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, June 13 -- Ban Ki-moon has been subject to critiques for being weak on human rights for nearly all of his four and a half years as UN Secretary General. While such weakness is surely a comfort to many UN member states, to others at least on paper it should be a problem, in supporting him for a second term. So how did Ban seek to turn this around?

  One way is to control what people say. In the run-up to Ban's drive for a second term, Human Rights Watch had been critical of Ban's record. But after HRW director Kenneth Roth met with Ban this Spring, and Inner City Press asked HRW on the record if Roth had brought up Ban's record in Myanmar, Sudan or Sri Lanka, the response by HRW's UN Director,a former journalist, was:

“To preserve our ability to have frank discussions with UN officials and advance our advocacy goals, we don't typically communicate on the content of discussions we have with them.”

  UN officials, of course, should not condition listening to or acting on human rights concerns on the silence of their interlocutors. (Separately, it is unclear to whom HRW would communicate what it raised: only donors?)

  But such a non-answer, delivered less than ten days before the June 6 campaign kick off for a second term as UN Secretary General, is certainly better for Ban.

  Earlier this Spring a group of ethnic Tamils came to the UN trying to deliver a petition calling for an international investigation into what they -- and Ban's own Panel of Experts -- call the killing of tens of thousands of Tamil civilians by Sri Lanka's government.

  They asked Inner City Press to cover their demonstration across First Avenue from Ban's office. The Ban administration told them that a mid level official would be willing to accept the handover of their petition in the lobby of the UN General Assembly, but that no members of the press should be among their group.

  Inner City Press stood to the side, to not hear anything that was said, and took two photographs of the handover. Shortly thereafter, Inner City Press was told that if photos of the handover were published, the Ban administration would not meet again with that group.

  There are in the wider world worse ways to silence people. But questions exist as to whether these actions are appropriate to the UN, not only for the past five years, but for five to come. Watch this site.