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

On #FreeViceNewsStaff, ICP Asks UN Which Says It's Still "Harvesting More Details"

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, September 1 -- After three Vice News journalists were arrested in Turkey on terrorism charges, for merely reporting on a conflict, Inner City Press on September 1 asked UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's spokesman Stephane Dujarric about the arrests, and about a similar US Defense Department publication that says some journalists can be treated as "unprivileged belligerents." Audio here, video here and embedded below.

  UN spokesman Dujarric cited Ban's previous comments about the Al Jazeera journalists in Egypt, but then said that in the Turkish case Ban or presumably his team is still "trying to harvest more details."

  What's so complicated? Journalists actually covering a conflict need to speak with both or all sides, and shouldn't be charged with terrorism for doing so.

Here's InnerCityPro's fast transcript:

ICP: there have been these arrests in Turkey of journalists from VICE News, two journalists and their translator, and there's also been a raid of a company called Koza-Ipek Media in Ankara.  I wanted to know, what does the Secretary-General and the Secretariat think of these arrests of journalists reporting on conflict?
 
UN Spox: We’re obviously aware of the issue regarding Vice News. We’re looking into it. The reports as they stand are troubling. We’re trying to harvest more details before expressing an opinion. I think the Secretary General has come out rather forcefully, notably in the last few days, on the situation of the Al Jazeera journalists and others in Egypt, and that there is a need for governments to ensure that journalists are able to work freely. I would say especially in zones of conflicts, where the risks of journalists are already high enough as they are.

Inner City Press: The US Department of Defense put out a handbook requiring journalists to register. Does the Secretariat…

A: Listen, I haven’t seen the Department of Defense book that you’re referring to. Obviously I think it also helps for policies to be put in place for journalists to ensure the safety of journalists, there’s always an equilibrium that needs to be found, and I’m sure there’s a healthy dialogue between the department of defense and the accredited  journalists at the Pentagon, and I will not get into it.

  The Vice News journalists at issue are Jake Hanrahan, Philip Pendlebury and translator Mohamed Ismail Rasool. In Ankara, Koza-Ipek Media has also been raided; Inner City Press asked the UN about that too.

  We note that the UN will hold its World Humanitarian Summit in Turkey in 2016 -- Ban spoke about it earlier on September 1 - and even has a Turkey-sponsored "Turkish Lounge" next to the Security Council, in an area that use to be journalist work-space. Those who would supposedly speak on this at the UN have been muted. But the question has been asked, and the Free UN Coalition for Access, see below, will follow up.

 Three day before on August 29, amid news that Egypt imposed prison sentences on Al Jazeera journalists Mohammed Fahmy, Baher Mohamed and Peter Greste, at 5 pm in New York while the UN had still said nothing at all, the US State Department said it was disappointed.

  Then at 10:30 pm in New York, 5 and a half hours after the US, the UN's Secretary General Ban Ki-moon issued a canned statement, "recalling" his own earlier canned statement - this from an organization which allowed its head of Peacekeeping to use Ban's guards to eject the Press from an open meeting, and refused to answer this week about the torching of a radio station in Burkina Faso. Now Ban is "harvesting facts" on the charges against the Vice News journalist. How long will that take?

 So far the UN has remained silent, just as it refused to answer Press questions about the burning-down of a radio station in Burkina Faso, as raised by the Free UN Coalition for Access (FUNCA).

   Ban Ki-moon didn't explain his silence while in Ethiopia for the recent African Union summit about the terrorism trial of that country's Zone 9 Bloggers.

  The Free UN Coalition for Access has been asking Ban's UN, and those who pass through it, about #FreeZone9Bloggers, as it asked about Peter Greste and his colleagues, for example here.

  On February 12, 2015 across First Avenue from the UN there was a panel discussion on protection of journalists at the International Peace Institute. Al Jazeera's Gabriel Elizondo spoke.

 Inner City Press ran across First Avenue and posed a question: does the UN system do for independent journalists and bloggers what it does for corporate or state media?

  The panelist who answered was David Kaye, UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression. Kaye said, "As an independent journalist, it's good to see you here. From different perspectives, I think that's right. Sometimes the UN can do so loudly and publicly. Some situation might call for a little bit more of a quieter engagement."
 
  Rapporteur Kaye said that "from the OHCHR perspective, we have different tools. Our first tool is to communicate with governments on the quiet side, send them allegation letters or urgent appeals, Zone 9 Bloggers being a good exampe of that.
If we don't get a response, to issue press releases, to call out bad behavior. I agree with the tenor or your comment -- we should be out there calling out the bad behavior at the moment that it happens, quietly or more publicly. Article 19 is not written to protect only journalists, it protects everyone's right to seek, receive and impart information."
 
  The other panelists were Bård Glad Pedersen, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Norway, Agnes Callamard, Director of the Global Freedom of Expression and Information Project at Columbia University and former Executive Director of Article 19, Matthew Rosenberg, Foreign Correspondent of the New York Times (with interesting stories of Afghanistan but who declined to discuss the NYT's coverage of Iraq before the US invasion) and Judith Matloff of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. There will be video.

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