Authors’ Response

In our article,¹ we recognized that UNICEF does important work to support children’s rights and that it played an important role in tobacco control when the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control was being negotiated.

At the same time, the article reveals that UNICEF is not immune to tobacco industry targeting. Tobacco companies carefully orchestrate their attempts to infiltrate organizations, often in a covert manner through third parties and front groups, to minimize awareness within the organization that they are being targeted by tobacco companies. They also use the good reputation of United Nations (UN) agencies to bluewash² their image, often without the consent of these organizations.

Peterson³ states that UNICEF was not involved in or aware of the 2003 ECLT project although ECLT claims that UNICEF had an advisory function to this project.⁴ ECLT again claimed UNICEF was part of a working group in a 2005–2009 project in Kyrgyzstan. At the very least, this situation reveals that ECLT was using UNICEF’s good reputation to promote its ECLT work and thereby the interests of the tobacco companies that created ECLT. This is, at a minimum, an example of “bluewashing.”

According to Peterson, we make unfounded claims that UNICEF received funding from PMI and JTI. However, according to UNICEF Kazakhstan’s 2010 annual report⁵ (cited in our article), UNICEF engaged with PMI, which resulted in a proposal for a $2 million investment. We point this out as an example of tobacco industry engagement with UNICEF. In addition, we do not state that UNICEF received funding from JTI; we report that a JTI employee is listed as a contributor on the recent UNICEF publication “Obligations and Actions on Children’s Rights and Business: A Practical Guide for States on How to Implement the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child’s General Comment No.16”⁶ as another example of tobacco industry engagement with UNICEF.

Authors of previous work have documented how tobacco companies infiltrated and partnered with UN organizations such as the World Health Organization, International Labour Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization, and United Nations Global Compact to undermine the UN’s tobacco control initiatives.^7,8 We, similarly, show how tobacco companies attempted to neutralize UNICEF’s tobacco control work by positioning itself as a partner.

We hope that our article will be used to raise awareness at UNICEF, and among children’s rights advocates more generally, to formalize a policy of not having any kind of direct or indirect involvement with tobacco industry and to stress the important role UNICEF has in protecting children from tobacco.

• Copyright © 2018 by the American Academy of Pediatrics