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By Matthew Russell Lee, CJR PFT Video

UN GATE, September 24 -- Who gets to decide which media can enter the United Nations to cover this month's United Nations General Assembly high level week?   

  The answer in today's UN, not unlike in any dictatorship whether China or Cameroon, is one man and his small circle of yes-men and a yes-women, with no due process, no right to appeal, no judicial oversight.   

  In this case the man is Antonio Guterres, and the new yes-woman is Melissa Fleming.

  They refuse to answer banned Inner City Press' questions about for example China, not only on Guterres' personal financial links to UN briber CEFC China Energy but also the country's lock up of human rights advocates like Jiang Tianyong.

 Now on the first day of the UNGA High Level week Guterres has banned Inner City Press from, UN "independent experts" as if to provide a fig leaf for the increasingly corrupted UN put out a statement: "Mr. Jiang was initially forcibly disappeared for a period and then sentenced in November 2017 to two years in prison for inciting subversion of State power. He was released in February this year.     “Despite his release, Mr. Jiang is not a free man. He remains under constant surveillance by the authorities and his movement is severely restricted. He continues to be punished, along with his family and friends, with harassment and intimidation by the authorities,” said the experts. They noted that while this is being done on the ground that he has been deprived of his political rights for three years, such treatment is both gratuitously punitive and legally unjustified....   The UN experts: Mr. Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights; Ms Agnes Callamard, Special Rapporteur on  extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions; Mr. Michel Forst, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders; Mr. David Kaye, Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression; and Mr. Bernard Duhaime (Chair), Mr. Tae-Ung Baik (Vice Chair), Ms. Houria Es-Slami, Mr. Luciano Hazan and Mr. Henrikas Mickevičius (members) of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances."

 Great - but what have these UN experts done about the UN itself censoring the Press? Kaye and Forst wrote in but haven't followed up - as Melissa Fleming makes the censorship even more Kafka-esque as she prepares to fly to China with Guterres. We'll have more on this.

  Guterres' motive became clear as Inner City Press, awaiting reinstatement, more closely covered the SDNY federal court where it is now fully accredited.   

  Convicted Patrick Ho's CEFC China Energy had been seeking to buy the Partex Oil Company from Gulbenkian Foundation which paid Guterres undisclosed moneys. It was and is, in short, outright personal corruption by Guterres, on which he refuses to answer questions.  

  On 24 August 2019, alongside continuing the cover the SDNY court, Inner City Press submitted a simple application to the UN like hundreds of other media to enter and cover the UNGA High Level week beginning September 23.   

  In response, Inner City Press received a Kafka-esque response by Guterres' UN Security Gilles Michaud that the assault on it was for being in a "locked area" - that is, the wide open lounge outside the UN Budget Committee meeting - and that all UN Security is doing is enforcing a decision by the UN Media Accreditation and Liaison Unit, now under Melissa Fleming.   

  Fleming refused to answer any of four letters sent to her. At 4:30 pm on Friday, August 30 her MALU issued a one-line denial of access: "Greetings Matthew Lee from Inner City Press,  Your media accreditation request, with reference no: M5413398, has been declined for the following reason: Media accreditation was withdrawn on 17 August 2018."   

  So Guterres' lawless UN can withdraw a critical media's accreditation for daring to ask why he omitted from his financial disclosure payments from a company selling its oil company to a Chinese government bribery vehicle - then use the withdrawal to automatically deny access to the UN General Assembly, the so-called global parliament of "We the Peoples."   

  If press freedom means anything, and if the UN is anything more than a dictatorship of a single corrupt censor, this cannot stand.

 Inner City Press will be reporting on the UN and its UNGA either way - but demands to be allowed to enter and cover the often shameful deals of undemocratic nations, like the hundreds of their state media that Guterres lets in to praise him.

The peoples demand the fall of this Guterres regime.

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