| On UNGA Day 1
Guterres Demands Accountability
From Everyone But Himself
by
Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Book
Substack
UN
GATE / SDNY, Sept 22 – 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 22
Secretary-General António
Guterres delivered his final
address. It is worth reading
against what his own office
has actually done with power
over the past eight years —
starting with his banning of
the Press, which he has never
once, in a decade of speeches
about transparency, addressed.
Guterres
told the Assembly: "We must
defend the Charter without
double standards." He has
never explained, in any
format, why Inner City Press
has been barred from UN
Headquarters since July 2018 —
dragged out by his own
Department of Safety and
Security while covering a
budget committee meeting, with
no hearing held and no appeal
ever granted. Whatever
standard justified that
exclusion has never been
stated; whatever standard
would end it has never been
offered either. A
Secretary-General who invokes
"no double standards" from a
podium the banned journalist
is not permitted to sit near
is demonstrating, rather than
rebutting, the very double
standard he warns
against.
He went further:
"We must... demand
accountability without fear or
favour." The Secretariat's own
accountability to the press it
covers daily — MALU's response
to Inner City Press's most
recent accreditation
application was a single
sentence confirming receipt,
"not a confirmation of
approval," and nothing since —
apparently falls outside the
accountability Guterres has in
mind. It is accountability
demanded of everyone else,
from a building that has spent
eight years demonstrating none
of its own.
On his dubious
UN80 reform initiative,
Guterres promised an
organization "more
transparent... more
disciplined with resources...
more present where people need
us." When staff ask questions,
they face retaliation.
Whatever
transparency UN80 has
delivered, it has not reached
the specific, standing
question this outlet has posed
for years: who decided to ban
a journalist, on what basis,
and why has that decision
never been reviewed. An
institution cannot credibly
claim to be building
transparency in the abstract
while declining, concretely,
to explain its own oldest
unresolved press-access
case.
The speech's most
quietly damning line may be
the one about artificial
intelligence, aimed at
everyone but himself:
"Decision-making without
transparency" is precisely
what Guterres named as "the
danger." He was describing AI
systems. He could as easily
have been describing his MALU
under Melissa Fleming.
And on the
substance, stripped of the
rhetoric: Guterres himself
conceded, of Gaza, "a scale of
killing and destruction unlike
anything I have witnessed in
all my years as
Secretary-General" — an
admission, on his own telling,
that the worst catastrophe of
his tenure occurred on his own
watch, under an institution he
has spent a decade insisting
is indispensable to preventing
exactly that. Security Council
reform, which he has called
for since his first year in
office, remains exactly where
it was: "Africa still has no
permanent representation on
the Council," a decade after
he first said it should.
He closes his tenure telling
the Assembly he will "never...
ever give up." On the ban that
has now outlasted nearly his
entire Secretary-Generalship,
he never started. Watch this
site.
Newly on the
September 22 speakers list is
Croatia, here on UN
corruption, just before
Guterres had Inner City Press
roughed up and banned:
UN
Briber Patrick Ho In
Appeal Reveals More
Lobbying In UN For China
Met Croatia President No
Audit (July
13, 2019) — In appeal filings,
convicted UN briber Patrick
Ho's lobbying activities on
China's behalf were shown to
have included a meeting with
Croatia's president, part of a
broader pattern the underlying
UN audit failed to capture.
Watch this site.
More on X for
Subscribers here
& Substack here
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