The United Nations Children’s Fund, which provides humanitarian and development assistance to children in developing countries, has allegedly violated its own code of conduct.
The allegation was raised by Nobonita Chowdhury, a resident of Dhaka. She claimed that the Unicef had used her newborn baby’s photo in its birth registration advertisement without consent.
“My daughter Anondita Kamal was born on June 15. On June 16, I took a picture of her and uploaded it as my Facebook profile picture,” she told the Dhaka Tribune.
On July 3, she came to know through her friends that her daughter’s picture had been published on the back page of an English daily in an advertisement to raise awareness about birth registration.
Nobonita called the Unicef office on July 6 and sent an email to Syeda Shima Islam, chief of communication, advocacy and partnership of Unicef Bangladesh, mentioning that no one from the organisation had taken permission from her or her family for publishing Anondita’s picture.
She also said such a serious breach of privacy was completely unexpected from the Unicef.
On July 8, in a reply to Nobonita’s complaint, Louise Mvono, deputy representative of Unicef Bangladesh, said: “The photo of your newborn baby was used as a result of a regrettable misunderstanding between one of our consultant and our partner organisation working to promote and establish the norm of ‘Birth Registration’ in Bangladesh.”
He also said the consultant took the photo from Nobonita’s Facebook account without permission, adding that there would be no recurrence of such a mistake in the future.
“After getting the email, I did not think about subjecting them to strict action because an apology was offered,” said Nobonita.
The Unicef’s code of conduct says permission for interviews, videotaping and documentary photographs should be taken in written form when possible and appropriate.
It, however, got worse when Unicef repeated the mistake by publishing posters of Nobonita’s daughter. The posters were seen in Gulshan, Bangla Motor, Dhanmondi and Kawran Bazar areas.
Nobonita said: “Yesterday, many of my friends said they had seen Unicef’s birth registration awareness posters containing my daughter’s photo.”
When Nobonita contact Unicef, it’s communication chief, told her in an email: “We have confirmed with our partner that there are 100 posters highlighting the issue of birth registration with your daughter’s photograph. These posters have been used around Dhaka city and were posted on July 2 ahead of the Birth Registration Day 2014. We have been assured by our partner that the posters will be taken down by tonight [last night].”
Expressing her discontent, Nobonita accused the Unicef officials of lying.
“If the posters were posted on July 2 then I would not have received calls from people seeing the posters yesterday. Moreover, even if the posters were posted on July 2, Unicef should have taken steps to take them down considering my July 6 email,” she said.
“This is a display of irresponsible behaviour on their part,” she added.
Iftikhar Ahmed Chowdhury, communication officer of Unicef Bangladesh, said: “I am not aware of this. In such cases, a consent form has to be signed by the parents, declaring that they would not object to have their child’s photo published. However, in this case, I do not know whether parents of the child in question were asked to sign the form but I will inform this to the top officials.”
Nobonita said she had talked to her lawyer and would send a legal notice on Sunday.