India, Bangladesh and Pakistan were among the six countries that abstained in a vote in a UN body to grant consultative status to CPJ, a US-based nonprofit organisation working to safeguard press freedom worldwide.
The 54-member UN Economic Social Council (ECOSOC) voted yesterday to grant consultative status to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), overturning a committee's refusal and allowing the organisation the right to encourage press freedom at different UN bodies and the Human Rights Council.
While 40 members of ECOSOC voted in favour of CPJ's application, five nations - China, Russia, Rwanda, Vietnam, Zimbabwe voted against and six nations Algeria, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, India, Pakistan, Uganda - abstained.
CPJ's application for UN accreditation had been pending since 2012. On May 26, CPJ's application was denied by a vote of the NGO committee and yesterday's vote by the full member council overrides that rejection.
India had abstained fromvotingin the May 26 ballot for CPJ. CPJ said getting consultative status will allow it to access UN bodies and processes, such as the Human Rights Council in Geneva, where accredited NGOs can deliver a counter-narrative to states.
"The council's vote today recognises the important role that CPJ has played and continues to play at the UN by providing expert knowledge and analysis on press freedom related issues," CPJ executive director Joel Simon said.
Simon said it was disheartening to see the "politicised process" for gaining accreditation to the UN and hoped that "the fact that our application took so long and was so contentious is a wakeup call for the bodies that ensure NGOs are able to access the United Nations".
CPJ said that in the four years that its application has been pending, 304 journalists have been killed in direct relation to their work.
The ECOSOC meeting was informed that China and the Russia had requested the vote on the resolution.
The representative of China expressed "regret and concern" over the practice whereby some countries forced the Council to overturn the decisions of the Non-Governmental Organization Committee, which was an authoritative organ of the UN.
He recalled that in May, the Non-Governmental Organization Committee had conducted its work, which should now be adopted by the Council by consensus.
The effort of some countries to overturn the decisions of the Non-Governmental Organization Committee was tantamount to stirring up confrontation, he said.
US envoy to the UN Samantha Power introduced the
resolution titled "Application of the non-governmental organization Committee to Protect Journalists for consultative status with the Economic and Social Council", saying that a free press was not only valuable in and of itself, but was a critical tool for protecting other rights.
She said CPJ worked to fight corruption, document human rights violations, provide a voice to those who were marginalized or at risk, and expose problems in societies that may otherwise go unseen.
She described CPJ as an independent, impartial organization with a long track record of fair reporting, yet it had been denied accreditation by the Non-Governmental Organization Committee for four years, during which time hundreds of journalists had been imprisoned, gone missing or lost their lives.
In recent years, the Non-Governmental Organization Committee had systemically abused its authority to delay the applications of legitimate organizations, with thousands of submissions having been deferred, often times because their work seemed to be critical of Governments.
"Honestly, this is outrageous", she said, adding that such practices hurt the ability of the United Nations to perform its duties.
