SOCIAL SUMMIT: German NGOs Urge Kohl to Take on ‘Global’ Role

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ramesh Jaura

BONN, Feb 17 1995 (IPS) - Germany’s non-governmental organisations (NGOs) urged Chancellor Helmut Kohl Friday to demonstrate at the World Summit for Social Development on Mar. 6-12 in Copenhagen a sense of “global responsibility”.

Coordinator of the ‘German NGO-Forum’, Erfried Adam, said the United Nations (U.N.) meet in the Danish capital offered an opportunity to prove that Bonn was capable of “global leadership” on issues of key significance for humankind.

The Forum comprises more than 40 German NGOs — dealing with social welfare, employees’ rights, development aid, environmental protection and political education — which in the run-up to the U.N. conference have formed a coalition that is unprecedented in the country’s history.

Adam welcomed Kohl’s decision to participate in the Social Summit along with some 100 other heads of government or state, but regretted that neither he nor his Minister of Labour and Social Affairs Norbert Bluem — Bonn government’s coordinator for the forthcoming global meet in Copenhagen — had come up with a public statement.

This stood in stark contrast to the “opinion leadership role” Bonn had played ahead of the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) June 1992 in Rio de Janeiro.

The NGO-Forum coordinator praised however the opposition parties’ move to put pressure on the government to make the U.N. conference a success.

The Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Alliance 90/The Greens had tabled separate motions Thursday in the German federal parliament, ‘Bundestag’.

These have been forwarded for consideration to the parliamentary committees for labour and social welfare, finances, economic affairs, the European Union and economic cooperation.

However, it is “unlikely” that the committees will return to the Bundestag with their recommendations well ahead of the World Social Summit, a parliament official told IPS Friday.

“The Bundestag will meet again on Mar. 6 when the Copenhagen meet starts,” he added.

In a four-page draft resolution, the SPD urges the Bundestag to declare that it does not regard the World Social Summit as an isolated event but rather as an essential follow-up to previous U.N. conferences.

At the same time, it wants to enhance the role of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and further develop the recommendations stipulated in the Convention of the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (1979), in the strategies for the future drawn up in Nairobi on the Promotion of Women (1985), in UNCED Agenda 21 (1992), and in the Vienna Human Rights Declaration (1993).

The 11-page motion tabled by the Alliance 90/The Greens places particular emphasis on “forward looking strategies for the advancement of women” agreed upon in Nairobi and the Geneva declaration on the “empowerment of rural women”.

Both the opposition parties back efforts towards reforming the United Nations to strengthen its effectiveness and its competence in regard to socially and ecologically oriented economic development.

The Greens want “a determined reform of the United Nations with the objective of democratising and strengthening the organisation”.

Only a strong United Nations could in the long-run help make international policy oriented towards a civil society, combat attempts at pushing through national interests and help bring about a North-South reconciliation.

The planning and implementation of the World Bank projects should be subject to scrutiny by an independent commission. It should focus on sustainability and environmental and social soundness of the projects, said the SPD draft motion.

The Alliance 90/The Greens want the projects of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) to be coordinated not only with the recipient countries but also with the U.N. Environmental Programme (UNEP), the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD).

Both the Greens and the SPD plead for a fundamental review of the structural adjustment programmes in the developing countries. “Social and ecological criteria should be placed at par with the economic criteria,” the SPD motion says.

The Alliance 90/The Greens argue: “The reason for the continuous sharpening of the global social and ecological crisis is the lack of a critical evaluation of the development model of the industrialised nations. An ecologically and socially sound economy is unthinkable without a structural reform in the North.”

“The external causes of impoverishment, unemployment and disintegration in many countries of the world are to no small extent based on existing structures in international economic relations,” the Greens’ resolution adds.

It also calls for creating a democratically elected economic and ecological council which in its competence is on par with the present United Nations Security Council in respect of economic and environmental issue. To start with, the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) should be strengthened.

Like the SPD, the Greens also plead for approval of the 20-20 compact proposed by the UNDP’s Human Development Report 1994, calling upon the developing and industrial nations to invest 20 percent of their development budgets on education, food and health.

The two resolutions call for an initiative for reduction of debts of developing nations and for writing off the debts for the poorest — least developed — countries which surpass prevailing regulations.

The two parties also urge the doubling of Germany’s official development assistance (ODA) to 0,7 percent of the Gross National Product (GNP) by the year 2000.