UNESCO withdraws its sponsorship of Reporters sans Frontières

The United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO) withdrew its sponsorship today from the French group Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF), on the occasion of “Internet Freedom Day.”

Diplomatic sources from UNESCO told Prensa Latina that the agency made the decision due to the repeated demonstration of a lack of ethics on the part of RSF in its goal of disqualifying a certain number of countries.

The conduct of RSF does not fit the profile or the purposes of UNESCO, and the group has once again shown itself to be sensationalist in its eagerness to set itself up as a court of inquisition against developing nations, according to the sources.

They said that because of this and previous actions, UNESCO decided to completely end its relationship with RSF and rule out any type of future collaboration.

The French group, which has been accused of having close ties to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), launched a campaign today supposedly aimed at exposing so-called “states with cyber-censorship.”

The diplomatic sources, who spoke with Prensa Latina on the condition of remaining anonymous, said that, interestingly, the RSF blacklist did not include a single Western country, and that its fire was concentrated on the so-called Third World.

Canadian journalist Jean-Guy Allard, in a number of news articles and a book, has exposed the fact that the RSF was financed in part by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) of the United States. He also demonstrated the group’s ties with admitted CIA agents and the financial support it had received from the European Union. In 2005, the EU gave RSF more than 1 million euros.