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UN Correspondents Association

Press Briefing on the NGO Committee, 16 March 2018

Comments by UN Assistant Secretary-General, Andrew Gilmour

Thank you for inviting me to participate in this event. Over the past years, the reported
number and severity of reprisals and intimidation against civil society – individuals and
NGOs – cooperating with the UN in the field of human rights have increased. What
often “gets the goat” of some governments is when NGOs have the gall to share
information with us, submit complaints about human rights violations to UN bodies,
attend UN events or trainings, and other forms of participation with the UN.

With this increase in reprisals and intimidation, there came the recognition by the former
Secretary-General that we needed a more comprehensive response – in terms of both
preventing and addressing cases – and I was designated to lead this effort. We, in
OHCHR, are monitoring not only “reprisals,” forms of retaliation for past cooperation
with the UN, but also measures of “intimidation,” meaning the intent to discourage future
participation or cooperation with us. The range of both of these take on different forms,
from travel bans, threats and harassment by officials, online smear campaigns,
surveillance, passing of restrictive laws, to physical attacks, arbitrary arrest and
detention, torture and ill-treatment, including sexual violence, denial of access to
medical attention and even killings.

Not on the same scale as what we see in the field, but also regrettable, is a
phenomenon sometimes seen at headquarters – with the use (or abuse) of
accreditation procedures being used to hinder people from speaking out in a number of
UN fora. There have been cases related to UN events, like a conference that requires
NGOs to pass security procedures to attend, and some have used that to block
participants, or for designation of ECOSOC status, which is for longer-term engagement
and participation with the UN. We have received reports that some Member States
have attempted to block the accreditation of NGOs, especially human rights NGOs,
through legal, political and procedural maneuvers in an attempt to silence critics.

Now, I think we are all aware that the NGO Committee – I won’t go so far as to call it the
“Anti-NGO Committee” – and its accreditation process, has sometimes been linked to
the issue of the reprisals. Indeed, this has been mentioned in successive annual
reports of the Secretary-General in this context.

Various UN human rights mechanisms have addressed the need for the Committee to
apply the criteria for assessing organizations in a fair and transparent manner. For
example, in an April 2017 letter to the NGO Committee, some UN special rapporteurs
raised concerns about the Committee’s decisions regarding granting accreditation to
NGOs, and about their working methods in general, which the mandate holders said
may hamper civil society access to the UN, and thus will affect their participation. They
raised concerns in particular about the deferral of applications for consultative status of
NGOs, which prevents them from engaging with UN bodies and human rights
mechanisms.

The NGO Committee has an important function, because it has the power to
recommend to ECOSOC whether any given NGO can have consultative status, or not.
This has obvious ramifications for participation, and in turn how we (who work for the
UN) engage with our civil society partners. We do welcome the fact that the Committee
has agreed to further transparency, and to make some of its public deliberations
available via webcast.

The Secretary-General and the High Commissioner have often spoken about the need
for a vibrant civil society freed from unnecessary constraints. Yes, the UN is an
intergovernmental body, of course, but “we the peoples” – the first three words of the
UN Charter – was not just a rhetorical flourish, or a joke. We mean it, which is why we
feel strongly that UN processes should not serve to undermine the important work of
civil society. We will continue to address individual cases as they come up, in the
context of the NGO committee’s work, and I look forward to engaging constructively with
the membership of the Committee and its distinguished chairperson to address these
concerns.

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