| As Guyana PR
Lobbies for Next SG Post Banned
Inner City Press Asks of Judge
Visa
by
Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Book
Substack
UN
GATE / SDNY, Sept 21
– For this 2026 UN General
Assembly, the last of Antonio
Guterres' desultory tenure,
Inner City Press banned
by Guterres applied
on July 25 to re-enter and
cover the speeches and section
of next UNSG. No response. On
September 20 UN Spokesperson
Stephane Dujarric had Inner
City Press removed even from a
Zoom briefing, video here.
So
Inner City Press will cover it
from the gate. On September 21
Inner City Press online
(replying on X) asked
Guyana's next UNSG candidate
(and Permanent Representative)
Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett:
"can you as
Guyana PR confirm or deny that
Guyana Judge Gino Persaud has
had his US visa blocked? If
so, will you be raising it in
this week's UNGA?"
No answer.
This
week's news that High Court
Judge Gino Persaud was turned
away from his own Saturday
travel itinerary, advised
mid-check-in that his U.S.
visa was "under review,"
stranding him en route to the
Commonwealth Magistrates' and
Judges' Association conference
in Jamaica, lands the same
week Guyana's own candidate
for UN Secretary-General
campaigns around UNGA, most
recently with Egypt.
What, if
anything, does a sitting
Guyanese judge's inability to
transit through Miami say
about the state of U.S.-Guyana
relations a Secretary-General
candidate from Guyana would
inherit, or be expected to
navigate?
This is not the
first time Inner City Press
has tracked Guyana's
relationship with the
institutions it now seeks to
lead. When Guyana and Rodrigues
Birkett
held the UN Security Council
presidency in February 2024,
Inner City Press wrote to
Guyana's Mission the day
before, asking
Rodrigues-Birkett's office for
access to cover the
presidency's opening press
briefing — questions prepared
on Gaza, UNRWA, the coups in
Gabon and Niger, Guyana's own
tensions with Venezuela, and
conflicts in Sudan, Ukraine,
Ethiopia, Cameroon, Yemen, and
Libya. No response came. The
Ambassador's press conference
that followed, Inner City
Press reported, mentioned
nothing on Ukraine and
suffered broken audio
throughout, "nothing but best
wishes and wishful thinking."
Separately, Inner
City Press has documented
Guyana's position at the
Security Council pressing for
UNRWA funding amid the Gaza
conflict, even as the U.S. and
others moved to defund the
agency.
Guyana's own visa
episode this week — a sitting
judge, mid-journey to a
conference specifically about
"judicial independence,
accountability, the Rule of
Law," unable to proceed
because of an unexplained U.S.
visa review — is the kind of
institutional friction that
rarely makes it into a
Secretary-General candidate's
prepared remarks. Whether
Guyana's candidate addresses
it today, or simply delivers
the kind of broken-audio best
wishes Inner City Press
documented from Georgetown's
own Mission eighteen months
ago, remains to be seen. Watch
this site.
Watch this site.
More on X for
Subscribers here
& Substack here
***
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