UN’s Legal Threats to Press

“It even sets a precedent for other humanitarian disasters like Darfur. If the government of Sri Lanka can strong arm the UN to hide causality figures that’s what the next government that wants to wipe out civilians is going to do,” Matthew Russell Lee told in an interview to Indian media.

“The UN’s withholding of casualty figures and satellite photos, and now its enabling of internment camps in Vanuniya, troubles me,” Lee writes to Human Right’s Chief.

Now Matthew Russell Lee, an investigative journalist of Inner City Press at UN, who is the only journalist mostly reporting on Sri Lanka at UN and a critic on UN’s inaction on Sri Lanka is under another broil with UN on press freedom.
 
Three of the UN’s Under Secretary Generals and the SG’s spokesperson and Director of Communications charge Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and Inner City Press for inaccurate reporting and their insistence on not publishing response clarifying UN’s position.

They have proposed not only legal action against three media organization, but to attempt constructive censorship of the third, Inner City Press.

As an online publication, to target the distribution mechanism which Google represent in 2009 is tantamount to seeking to remove a publication from the global newsstand. It is an inappropriate response to critical coverage, and seems to contravene Article 19 of the UN’s own Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Inner City Press argues.

Inner City Press says it puts online whatever responses the UN provides and has submitted an open letter to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, formally requesting her action.

“I am an independent journalist who covers the work of the UN system, most recently accompanying and covering the Secretary General’s visit to Sri Lanka’s internally displaced persons camps and “No Fire” Zone, via fly-over. The UN’s withholding of casualty figures and satellite photos, and now its enabling of internment camps in Vanuniya, troubles me,” Lee writes to Human Right’s Chief.

The purpose of his letter, he says, is to bring to her attention as the UN system’s final arbiter and expert on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights a trend in which this Secretariat is veering from the positions on freedom of the press required by the UDHR.

He showed an example for violating freedom of press, “just after an Indian television journalist interviewed me at the Security Council stakeout on June 1 about the Secretary General’s trip to and actions in Sri Lanka, the director of the UN’s Media Accreditation and Liaison Unit went over to the journalist and openly urged them not to include or use what I said, which raised questions about the UN’s human rights compliance.”

He urged action on her part as the human right’s chief “for the UN Secretariat to be trying to censor independent media which has inquired into and made public questions about the UN’s withholding of casualty figures and satellite photos, and now its enabling of internment camps in Vanuniya, calls for action on your part, as the UN’s highest official on human rights including Article 19.”

Matthew Lee in his interview to NDTV said that the allegations of a muted UN response to civilian deaths would have serious repercussions if proved to be true.

“It even sets a precedent for other humanitarian disasters like Darfur. If the government of Sri Lanka can strong arm the UN to hide causality figures that’s what the next government that wants to wipe out civilians is going to do,” said Matthew Russell Lee.

NDTV remarked “the Secretary General’s office has been quick and vehement in its denial to down play the number of causalities in Sri Lanka. Yet, for an organization, which has lost virtually all credibility in fighting genocide and ethnic violence, over the past decade, the latest allegations will only lead to more forceful calls for a serious overhaul.”