On May 3, the United Nations (UN) will celebrate “World Press Freedom Day, “even though they have an abysmal track record of press freedom. In October of last year, 2014, at a tobacco Control meeting in Moscow hosted by the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO), the media were banned from reporting and physically removed from the meeting site. That meeting, complete with caviar dinners and luxury hotel stays for WHO officials, cost taxpayers from around the World approximately $20 million.

Two years earlier, at another WHO tobacco control meeting in Seoul, South Korea, the same Cabal of unelected and unaccountable international bureaucrats barred media.

To date, neither the UN nor the WHO has made any effort to explain why it threw the media Out of these taxpayer funded conferences.

The undersigned taxpayer and free market organizations from around the world are asking the United Nations for a full explanation of why this was allowed to happen.

At the foundation of any free and fair society is a government that respects the freedom of the Press and upholds that principle by guarding against any efforts to dilute the open exchange of News and ideas.

Taxpayers should never be put in a position where their hard earned contributions to Government coffers are used to support organizations that do no respect the freedom of the Press. Unfortunately, in the case of the United Nations, this is exactly what taxpayers around the world are being forced to do.

Numerous other examples of UN sponsored media sponsorship, including the blacklisting by the WHO of a prominent reporter investigating that body’s failure to appropriately respond to Last year’s West African Ebola outbreak, paint a disturbing portrait of taxpayers unknowingly Funding anti-democratic actions they would never tolerate by their own governments.

Taxpayers across the globe have a message for the UN: we will not tolerate our governments wasting taxpayers’ hard earned money on organizations that do not respect the values we cherish Most and call on governments to cease funding organizations that operate behind closed doors absent openness and transparency.

Yours Sincerely,

Signed

Frank Asiedu Bekoe
(EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR,TAXPAYERS’ ALLIANCE GHANA)
Mobile:+233-204074751
Email:tpa.ghana@gmail.com