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UN Secretariat's Miscount in
Human Rights Council Vote Remains Unexplained
Byline:
Matthew Russell Lee of
Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis
UNITED
NATIONS, May 29 -- What explains the UN Secretariat's vote
counting
being wrong by ten whole ballots of a mere 189 cast in the May 21
Human Rights
Council voting? Despite Inner City Press on Thursday asking both Ban
Ki-moon's
Deputy Spokesperson and her counterpart for the President of the
General
Assembly, no explanations has been proffered. The PGA's spokesman
guessed that
one abstention became ten by the addition of a zero. He said that in
the
future, optical scanning technology is being considered. But counting
189
votes, without missing by ten, is something most elementary schools can
do.
PGA Srgjan Kerim's May 22 letter
to Ambassadors (but not the public)
admitted
I have been informed by the Secretariat that there
were
two recording errors by the Secretariat: one in the number of
abstention ballots
and the other in the number of Members voting. The registration for
abstention should have been 1 (one) instead of 10
and the number of Members voting should
have been 189 (192 ballots
received, minus two invalid ballots, minus one abstention ballot)
instead of 182.
Since the errors were "by the Secretariat," on
Thursday Inner
City Press asked, as
transcribed
On
elections, there is a letter from the President of the General
Assembly, Mr.
Kerim, saying that the voting for the Human Rights Council... He said that the Secretariat -- so I am assuming
that is the Secretariat -- informed him of errors.
Instead of 10 abstentions there was one, and
instead of 189 votes there were 182. So
there are sort of... big problems with the counting of votes last week. Can you explain… Is that the Secretariat’s
role to count the votes?
Deputy
Spokesperson: This is the first I have
heard of it. Let me look into it and get
back to you [Video here,
from Minute 11:10]
Voting on May 21, nine extra abstentions not
shown
To try to ensure a response, Inner City Press
followed-up by e-mailing a copy of the PGA's letter to the Deputy
Spokesperson
in order to ask and get an answer
1) which
unit(s) of the Secretariat were involved in counting the votes on May
21?
2) how and why did they over-report abstentions by a power of 10, and
undercount
the votes count?
3) what is the Secretariat doing about these errors?
4) what other UN system elections do these units of the Secretariat
work on?
Also, yesterday's Serry question, and the still unanswered OLA
questions.
But ten hours later, no answer had been sent to
Inner City Press. Into
the UN's transcript, a statement on an unrelated issue was inserted. So
how did
the Secretariat so badly miscount the votes? We will continue on this
story.
* * *
These reports are
usually also available through Google
News and on Lexis-Nexis.
Click
here for a Reuters
AlertNet piece by this correspondent
about Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army. Click
here
for an earlier Reuters AlertNet piece about the Somali National
Reconciliation Congress, and the UN's $200,000 contribution from an
undefined trust fund. Video
Analysis here
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