Fisher Capital Management News: Wikileaks Targets Unesco

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Wikileaks has issued a warning yesterday to an unlikely target of their #occupy campaign: UNESCO, a United Nations’ agency focused in promoting human rights.

The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization hosted a two-day conference together with the World Press Freedom Committee (WPFC), an international NGO, on February 16-17.

Entitled, “The Media World after Wikileaks and News of the World”, the conference appears to deal with media and freedom of speech, prompting Wikileaks to request participation. They were flatly denied an opportunity to speak in the event. UNESCO’s reason? Ironically, they chose not to allow Wikileaks representation as an act of exercising their freedom of expression.

One of the press releases from the organizers announced that they are gathering a range of speakers worldwide to ‘ensure that these questions are considered from the various perspectives of the global media’. Oddly enough, they left out Wikileaks which is one of the most important media players in the past several years.

Wikileaks, led by its founder Julian Assange, expressed their ...
... outrage and warning at not being given a speaking opportunity on panel discussions.

UNESCO countered that the event is mainly about journalism and not Wikileaks. The latter begs to disagree — they are claiming that they are part of the journalism sector.

On Wikileaks side, they believe that invoking ‘freedom of expression’ to ban them from a conference concerning them is “an absurdity beyond words”.

Assange said, “This is an intolerable abuse of UNESCO’s Constitution… It has made itself an international human rights joke… It’s time to occupy UNESCO.

Key speakers in the conference include Geoffrey Robertson, Assange’s lawyer, though he cleared that he is not a representative of Wikileaks. On the other hand, four of the other speakers have active legal conflicts on the whistle-blowing organization.

UNESCO’s responded by saying that Wikileaks is making a big deal out of it — they said Wikileaks is free to attend, just not allowed to as a speaker. According to them, they are only frustrated that they were not able to be in the limelight.

However, some are commenting that Wikileaks might have overreacted in this, making it appear as a big issue on censorship.

It is really rather ironic and awkward that WPFC and UNESCO would stifle free speech in a conference that talks about free speech. For the sake of a balanced story, they should have given the Wikileaks’ camp a chance to be duly represented, especially when there are lots of their critics present.

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