Founded | 2011 |
---|---|
Type | Non-governmental organization |
Location |
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Fields | UN monitoring, human rights advocacy |
Website | www |
PassBlue is an independent, US-based digital publication that monitors and reports on activities by the United Nations. It was founded in the fall of 2011 as a project of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the City University of New York. PassBlue moved to the New School, a private university, and is now under the fiscal sponsorship of the Institute for Nonprofit News.
The term PassBlue is a play on the diplomatic passport known as laissez-passer ("let pass"), a blue travel document used by UN officials on missions and issued by national governments and world institutions during wartime and other periods to allow officers to travel to specific areas. PassBlue does not have an official association with the UN. [1] [2] [3] [4]
In its 2013 description of PassBlue, the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies said on its website:
"The articles and essays are written by top UN journalists, who include Barbara Crossette, a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times and UN correspondent for The Nation ; Irwin Arieff, who covered the UN, the White House and other assignments for Reuters; Helmut Volger, the editor of A Concise Encyclopedia of the United Nations; and Dulcie Leimbach, former editor of UNA's The InterDependent and “A Global Agenda: Issues Before the UN” and an editor/writer at The New York Times for more than two decades." [3]
In 2015, PassBlue was financed primarily through the Carnegie Corporation of New York, with other grants from the Samuel Rubin Foundation, the Feminist Majority Foundation, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation as well as individual donors. [5] PassBlue has also received funding from the Open Society Foundations "To support The New School's project PassBlue expand their operational capacity to serve as a watchdog media site on the UN and related foreign affairs institutions." [6]
PassBlue is also supported by the Wallace Fox Foundation, Pinkerton Foundation and other charitable institutions, as well as by thousands of individual donors. [7]
PassBlue has been led since its founding by Dulcie Leimbach, who serves as editor of its articles, and Barbara Crossette. Its managing editor is John Penney. It has engaged hundreds of writers for its publications since its founding. [8]
PassBlue is frequently cited source in the references of numerous Wikipedia pages. As of 13 July 2024, PassBlue is cited in the references for more than 35 articles on Wikipedia. [9]
The Arkansas Collegiate Model United Nations cites PassBlue among its curated "resources for competing in Model United Nations conferences and understanding basic issues of global governance." [10]
The Johnson County United Nations Association in Iowa has a web page of curated resources it says provide information on "topics of interest to the UNA-USA" and recommends PassBlue as a resource for independent day-to-day updates on the work of the United Nations. [11]
PassBlue's resources and staff are often cited by other media, such as by The New York Times in a 2021 story about the resumption of the annual in-person meeting of the UN General Assembly since the COVID-19 pandemic [12] and another in 2018 about the US bans on diplomatic visas for foreign same-sex domestic partners. [13]
Staff at PassBlue are also contacted for quotes by various media outlets and think tanks, such as in this article by the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs about media coverage of the UN. [14]
In 2020, Hillary Clinton sent a link via what was then Twitter to a PassBlue article regarding the progress for women's rights since the 1995 Beijing conference for gender equality. [15]
In 2021, Clair MacDougall was honored by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) for an article in PassBlue about the first death from COVID-19 of a UN PeaceKeeper. [16]
PassBlue frequently posts updates in real time from UN meetings, such as the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly, resulting in comments such as that of Adil Ahmad Haque, a professor at Rutgers Law School and executive editor of Just Security, during the introduction of draft text of a UN General Assembly Resolution ES-10/23 to upgrade Palestine's rights in the United Nations as an Observer State, who said "I probably won't live tweet the whole meeting, so follow @pass_blue" [17]
The United Nations (UN) is a diplomatic and political international organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and serve as a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations. It is the world's largest international organization. The UN is headquartered in New York City, in international territory with certain privileges extraterritorial to the United States, and the UN has other offices in Geneva, Nairobi, Vienna, and The Hague, where the International Court of Justice is headquartered at the Peace Palace.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali was an Egyptian politician and diplomat who served as the sixth Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1992 to 1996. Prior to his appointment as secretary-general, Boutros-Ghali was the acting Minister of Foreign Affairs of Egypt between 1977 and 1979. He oversaw the United Nations over a period coinciding with several world crises, including the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Rwandan genocide.
Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke was an American diplomat and author. He was the only person to have held the position of Assistant Secretary of State for two different regions of the world.
Ralph Johnson Bunche was an American political scientist, diplomat, and leading actor in the mid-20th-century decolonization process and US civil rights movement, who received the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for his late 1940s mediation in Israel. He is the first black Nobel laureate and the first person of African descent to be awarded a Nobel Prize. He was involved in the formation and early administration of the United Nations (UN), and played a major role in both the decolonization process and numerous UN peacekeeping operations.
Ralph Bunche Park is a small municipal public park in the Turtle Bay neighborhood of New York City, on First Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets. It was named in 1979 for Ralph Bunche, the first African-American to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Major Sir Brian Edward Urquhart was a British international civil servant and World War II veteran, and author. He played a significant role in the founding of the United Nations. He went on to serve as its Under-Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs.
Salim Ahmed Salim is a Tanzanian politician and diplomat who has worked in the international diplomatic arena since the early 1960s. He served as prime minister for one year, from 1984 to 1985.
The United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) is a United Nations agency dedicated to implementing humanitarian and development projects for the United Nations System, international financial institutions, governments and other partners around the world, with a focus on infrastructure, procurement and project management The organization's global headquarters is located at the UN City campus in Copenhagen, Denmark. UNOPS delivers around $3 billion worth of development projects for its partners every year. Its activities have ranged from managing the construction of schools in Afghanistan, to building shelters in Haiti, to procuring ambulances to support the Ebola response in Liberia.
David M. Malone, born in 1954, is a Canadian author on international security and development, as well as a career diplomat. He is a former president of the International Peace Institute, and a frequently quoted expert on international affairs, especially on Indian Foreign Policy and the work of the UN Security Council. He became president of the International Development Research Centre in 2008 and served until 2013. On 1 March 2013, he took up the position of UN Under-Secretary-General, Rector of the United Nations University, which he fulfilled until 28 February 2023.
Barbara Crossette is an American journalist. Now United Nations correspondent for The Nation, she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a trustee of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and a member of the editorial advisory board of the Foreign Policy Association. She was a writer on international affairs for The New York Times for many years.
The Ralph J. Bunche Library, formerly the State Department Library, is the oldest federal government library in the United States. The library is currently located in room 3239 of the Harry S Truman Building.
Alan Claude Doss is a British international civil servant who has spent his entire professional life in the service of the United Nations, working on peacekeeping, development and humanitarian assignments in Africa, Asia and Europe as well as at United Nations Headquarters in New York City.
Maria C. Freire is a Peruvian-American biophysicist who was the president and executive director of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH) from 2012-2021. She also is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine and Council on Foreign Relations. Freire works in global health, technology commercialization and intellectual property management, focusing on the discovery, development and access to medical interventions.
Sylvana Foa is a former American journalist and public affairs specialist. She was the first woman to serve as the foreign editor of a major international news organisation, the first woman to serve as a news director of an American television network and the first woman to serve as spokesperson for the Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Thomas G. Weiss is a distinguished international diplomat and scholar of international relations and global governance with special expertise in the politics of the United Nations, where he himself served in various high-ranking roles. He was named a 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellow for a project exploring the concept of a world without the United Nations. Since 1998, he has been Presidential Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and is Director Emeritus of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. At present, he also is co-chair, Cultural Heritage at Risk Project, J. Paul Getty Trust; Distinguished Fellow, Global Governance, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs; Global Eminence Scholar, Kyung Hee University, Seoul. In his spare time, he is a wood sculptor.
Michael D. Weiss is an American journalist, author, and media commentator. He specializes in international affairs, in particular the Middle East and Russia. He is a contributing editor at New Lines magazine, a senior correspondent for Yahoo News, and editor of The Insider. He is a regular network guest on several CNN shows. He is also director of special investigations at the Free Russia Foundation.
A United Nations Secretary-General selection was held in 1996 at the end of Boutros Boutros-Ghali's first term. Boutros-Ghali ran unopposed for a second term and received the support of 14 of the 15 members of the United Nations Security Council. However, the United States vetoed his re-selection and eventually forced him to withdraw his candidacy.
Hilal Elver is a member of the Academic Council of the UN Least Developed Countries (2011-2021) and was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food from June 2, 2014, until May 1, 2020. She is also a research professor at University of California, Santa Barbara and a Global Distinguished Fellow at the Resnick Food Law and Policy Center UCLA Law School.
The Howard School of International Relations is a school of academic thought originating at Howard University in the decades between the 1920s and 1950s. Articulated by scholars such as Merze Tate, Ralph Bunche, Alain Locke, E. Franklin Frazier, Rayford Logan, and Eric Williams, the Howard School emphasized race and empire in the study of international relations. These scholars posed a sustained critique of dominant international relations theories such as racial hierarchy, which vindicated the Jim Crow era in the U.S. as well as the practice of colonialism in the world through the 1960s.
Constantin Stavropoulos was the former Undersecretary General of the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs of the United Nations.