UNITED NATIONS - A UN agency for women's issues admitted yesterday it forgot to pay an Internet registration fee, enabling a pornographic company to snap up one of the sites and plaster it with pictures of naked women.
Plugging into www.unifem.org now guides an Internet user to "Strap On Fetish," which has links to scores of hard-core pornography sites.
"The Web manager discovered it first," said Micol Zarb, a spokeswoman for the agency, created in 1976 to help women stand up for themselves and fight exploitation.
"She was totally shocked and also a little upset. Your bills come in the mail and sometimes you forget to pay them on time. In this case it was something where you let something lapse, and it causes a big stir for the organization."
Unifem is part of the UN Development Program. At unifem. undp.org yesterday, the women's agency posted a warning about the pornographic site, saying an "unknown group has taken over the UNIFEM domain name."
A search by the National Post discovered unifem.org is now registered to Triple Zero Networks, based in the Estonian capital of Tallinn. It paid US$12.95 for rights to the site for a year, from Oct. 2, 2001.
"We discovered [the site] in a short period of time -- not more than a couple of weeks," said Ms. Zarb. "It's all in the hands of the UN legal department. We'll pay the necessary fee to register that name for ourselves."
Unifem also failed to re-register unifem.com, allowing that site to fall into the hands of Cambridge Capital Investment Ltd. of Coral Gables, Fla., which is now trying to sell it to the highest bidder.
To reclaim the sites, Unifem must file a complaint with the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which arbitrates domain name disputes.
Lawyers must prove "Unifem" is the agency's trademark and does not belong to the companies that have claimed the Web sites. The agency must also show the companies used the name in bad faith.
"The process takes 40-50 days," said Samar Shamoon, a spokeswoman for the Geneva-based WIPO, which is also trying to devise rules that automatically protect UN domain names from cyber-squatters.
Several organizations and celebrities have recovered domain names through WIPO, including Celine Dion, the Canadian singer. They won cases against Jeff Burger, an Alberta-based cyber-squatter, who had claimed more than 1,000 Web names of celebrities, companies, and others.
Unifem, which spends much of its US$30-million-a -year budget on helping women in developing countries, hopes to adopt unifem.org as its only Web site.
"The important thing is that people don't get confused, and find their way to our Web site," Ms. Zarb said.
"Unifem works to promote respect of women but this Web site shows women as commercial products and is selling women's bodies."