UKRAINE: REFORM OF THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

When it joined the Council of Europe in 1995, Ukraine agreed to shift management of the prison system to the Ministry of Justice until the end of 1998. In that year the administration of criminal sentencing was taken away from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and transferred to the State Department for the Enforcement of Sentences, a new body independent of the executive branch. Since 2000 the Department's activity has been directed by the minister of justice, whose ministry formulates and oversees the administration of criminal sentencing by the Department.

THE BUSINESS OF WATER

Slowly the world is waking up to the fact that we are in the grip of a water (and sanitation) crisis. Today 884 million people have no access to a safe supply of water, while the UN has estimated that by 2030 more than half the world's population will live in areas at high risk of water scarcity. It's not surprising that the corporate world is becoming more and more aware that growing demand and competition for water is creating an uncertain future. Water has now become big business. There is interconnectedness between the issue of people's access to water, companies with a vested interest in water for business needs, and companies focusing on emerging markets. This global crisis positions peopleÂ's right to access safe water as a critical component of businesses responding to the challenges of growing demand and competition for water resources. Businesses reliant on using water in direct operations and across supply chains -in particular multinational companies- are increasingly recognising the political, social, economic and environmental risks linked to water. Ultimately, if people are unable to access water due to the activities of a company, the companyÂ's reputation and licence to operate is put at risk. In response to this we have seen a proliferation of high-profile campaigns relating to water from some of the worldÂ's leading companies. All tend to have common themes: highlighting the good work that they are doing to minimise the amount of water used in production, cutting down on the level of pollution arising from industrial processes, and headlining that they are spending money to ensure more people have access to a clean safe supply of water. The commitments made by the worldÂ's leading companies are to be applauded. However, when faced with the reality that almost a billion people are currently living without safe water, and coupled with risk for their own operations, it is clear that businesses must reassess their game plan. Feel-good campaigns are not enough. The private sector, governments and civil society all need to scale up their efforts if we are to achieve equitable access to water for the worldÂ's poorest people. Alongside campaigns and initiatives to provide water, businesses must address the causes behind the social injustice at the root of the crisis -not only from a humanitarian perspective, but to ensure that business manages the shared risk that a low supply of water entails. The impact of water poverty on the developing world is immense -particularly on child health, girlsÂ' education prospects, and womenÂ's welfare and livelihoods. Many women and children in rural areas of developing countries spend hours each day walking kilometres to collect water from unprotected sources such as open wells, muddy dugouts or streams -often forgoing school or work. In urban areas women can face hours standing in queues at water points where the liquid may come on tap for one or two hours a day, or they are faced with collecting it from polluted waterways, or from vendors at high prices and from other dubious sources. Often dirty and unsafe, this water can be lethal. This year a systematic review by The Lancet pointed to diarrhoea as the biggest killer of children in sub-Saharan Africa. Ninety percent of diarrhoeal cases in the developing world are caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation -killing more children than AIDS, measles and malaria combined. With such fatal consequences for human development, it is simply not enough for companies to internalise the issue through sound water resource management systems (this should be standard practice), or to invest in community water schemes and feel that their part in the jigsaw is complete. Companies do not operate in a vacuum and need to think of their role in the wider socio-political mix. We are now at a stage when companies, donors, civil society organisations and governments need to come to together to address and mitigate shared risks. There are many blockages currently stopping us from achieving a vision of a world where everyone has access to water and sanitation, from regulatory failings and lack of enforcement, issues of capacity and resources, ineffective prioritisation and coordination of funding to a lack of available and reliable data in a catchment area. Such issues clearly create challenges for companies in their pursuit to maintain legal and social license to operate. But more importantly they create growing difficulties for some of the worldÂ's poorest people to have access to water. Only by broadening their approach and actively addressing the areas of shared risk through cooperative and integrated approaches will companies be able to truly make a lasting contribution to the worldÂ's water crisis. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS) (*) Duncan Wilbur, Private Sector Engagement Advisor of WaterAid (www.wateraid.org) This column is part of a series of opinion articles and interviews about corporate social and environmental responsibility, supported by Anheuser-Busch InBev.

IMPERIAL DECLINE AND THE PROSPECTS FOR A JUST PEACE IN PALESTINE

For more than half a century, the gushing wound of Palestine has assaulted the global conscience, continuously reminding people everywhere of the imperial atrocities of Israel and the US in the Middle East and other areas.

BRAZIL: CONTINUITY AND ACCELERATION

Brazil has already achieved well ahead of schedule the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for reducing poverty, one of eight established in September 2000 by 170 heads of state brought together at a United Nations summit in New York. The target date stipulated in the agreement was 2015. In the last eight years Brazil has stepped up implementation of an array of public policies that were designed to eradicate extreme poverty in the country as part of a larger plan that would guarantee both economic development and social inclusion.

ECO-REFUGEES: FORCED MIGRATION YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW

For the entire month of August the front pages of the world's major daily papers gave considerable coverage of developments in the Indus Valley: monsoon rains in the north of Pakistan in late July, the flooding of rivers and tributaries, submerged land, villages, and towns, then more flooding in the centre and south of the country, the contamination of wells and aqueducts and other sources of water, inadequate international funding, flight, desperation, and anger. Almost two thousand dead were immediately confirmed, thousands and thousands of people lost, six million left homeless, 10 million evacuated, 20 million effected in some way. They could be defined climate- or eco-refugees.

AS TUNA NUMBERS FALL, FISHERY MANAGEMENT FAILS TO ACT

Eastern Atlantic bluefin tuna (BFT) will once again dominate discussions at the upcoming International Convention for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) Annual Meeting, which will be held in Paris, November 17-27.

LOST UTOPIAS, DREAMT UTOPIAS

Six years ago, when I leapt definitively down the rabbit hole of writing a book about the exile and assassination of Leon Trotsky, and the bizarre and spurious selection, training, and fate of the man who would ultimately be his assassin (the Catalan Ramon Mercader), I frequently asked myself the same question that journalists and readers have asked me since the publication of the novel in Spain in September 2009, and recently published in Italy in the first of a number of translations underway: what can you tell us that is new about the history of the assassination of the ousted communist leader exactly 70 years ago, with WWII raging and in a remote world in which, at the end of that conflict political systems would divide into two camps, the communist and the capitalist. A distant time in which a large part of humanity still believed (despite Stalin) in the possibility of a proletarian socialist utopia founded by the October Revolution, the better world always dreamt of by man.

THE EU NEEDS A GLOBAL STRATEGY

The European Union is developing strategic thinking as a basis for its policies.

ADDRESSING HARMFUL DRINKING GLOBALLY: EMPHASIS ON STRATEGY

The World Health OrganizationÂ's (WHO) adoption this year of a Global Strategy to Reduce Harmful Use of Alcohol was historic not only for being much-needed and long-awaited, but also for being focused on what can feasibly be done, and done now. As nations around the world assess the burdens they attribute to harmful drinking and what they can do, the Alcohol Strategy provides compelling impetus and guidance for immediate action. WHO recommends 10 target areas for action, with a helpful reframing of policy options in an arena where “solutions” in the past have been few and often highly proscriptive. The Alcohol Strategy also invites a diverse array of contributors to the table - making a clean break from times when alcohol policy was typically made in forums that excluded the people who know a great deal about alcohol, the producers. WHO has acknowledged that “economic operators in alcohol production are important players” in the hard work ahead to reduce alcohol-related harm, and further states that alcohol companies are “especially encouraged to consider effective ways to prevent and reduce harmful use of alcohol.” As president of an organization that has been working with alcohol companies for 15 years to help reduce harmful drinking worldwide and encourage cross-sector dialogue and partnerships, I welcome this call to action. Far more significant is the fact that WHO is urging nations to address the harmful use of alcohol as part of a larger, well-reasoned “strategy.” Past regulatory approaches have at times profoundly lacked strategic elements. In many countries around the world, although well-intentioned, governments have often taken rather simplistic approaches to a complex matter. And in countries where resources are scarce, those resources have often been used up by measures yielding disappointing outcomes, or even unintended negative results. In fact, WHO points out a discrepancy “between the increasing availability and affordability of alcohol beverages in many low- and middle-income countries and those countriesÂ' capability and capacity to meet the possible additional public health burden that follows.” To be successful, approaches to reduce harmful drinking should bear in mind that the issue is not consumption of alcohol, but harmful consumption. It is not availability of alcohol per se that is problematic, but the consequences we see when people drink problematically. For example, where taxes and prices have been raised in an attempt to restrict availability and consumption, such efforts have often led to increases in black market activity because access to legitimate alcohol has been too severely restricted. And from Eastern Europe to Africa and Asia-Pacific, we have seen far too many injuries and deaths where people turn to illicitly brewed alcohol or alcohol “substitutes” not intended for human consumption. Research has consistently shown that chronic, problem drinkers are the least likely to change their behavior and drink less if prices increase. They may switch to less expensive drinks, they may drink at home more and go out less, but they will always find a way to drink. Even when and where alcohol has been - or is - completely prohibited, those determined to drink excessively do so. Contrary to what the more vocal critics of the alcohol industry may presume, some of the people most concerned and knowledgeable about combating harmful drinking are actually the people who produce alcohol beverages. Producers have developed, supported and participated in programs with government and law enforcement agencies, educational institutions, public health organizations and retailers to prevent drunk driving, underage consumption and other harmful alcohol use and have a good deal of knowledge to share about these programs - and enthusiasm to share in others. For example, there is the work of Global Actions on Harmful Drinking (www.global-actions.org), a consortium of initiatives dedicated to helping reduce the harmful use of alcohol. This work is the result of a collective commitment made by the chief executives of major international alcohol beverage producers to make a significant effort in the 2010-2012 timeframe to address harmful drinking through a combination of global and local actions. The initiatives place an emphasis on low- and middle-income countries - with a focus on drunk driving, self-regulation of alcohol marketing, and non-commercial (illicit) alcohol. These efforts follow the same line of thinking reflected in WHOÂ's Alcohol Strategy: What is required is a range of options so that different countries and communities can select which combination of measures is likely to work best for them, given their drinking culture and health priorities. There is promise in such approaches that are developed enough to work in practice, not just in theory. As alcohol producers work in concert with health professionals, governments, and civil society to reduce the harmful use of alcohol, more is now possible. With the benefit of a new sense of stakeholder partnership and guidance from WHO, there is strength in numbers and there is a feasible strategy for what can be done, and done now. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

INCREASING WATER SCARCITY: AN EXPLOSIVE GLOBAL PROBLEM

In recent years, climate change seems to have elbowed out other environmental issues to become the number one global problem. But the alarming problems of water -increasing scarcity, lack of access to drinking water, and sanitation, pollution, flooding- are equally important and an even more immediate threat.

A SUMMIT FOR LIVING IN HARMONY WITH NATURE INTO THE FUTURE

At the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro held in June 1992, which witnessed the birth of the Convention on Biological Diversity, former Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa stated “Our joint endeavor to protect the global environment has just been launched. The real challenge is how we can translate our political will here in Rio into future actions to save the Earth. However steep the climb may be, we must move forward.” Eighteen years later, the need to translate political commitments into concrete action is just as pressing. As Japanese Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara stated at the High-Level Event on Biodiversity of the recent UN General Assembly, "for the future generations to inherit the benefits of nature, it is imperative that we specifically indicate collective actions over the next 10 years.”

THE CHANGING PATTERNS OF WORLD TRADE

The global trade landscape has changed profoundly in the past decade ­more profoundly, I suspect, than we fully understand. These changes are being driven partly by market opening, but mainly by transport, communications and information technologies. It now costs less to ship a container from Marseille to Shanghai ­half way around the world­ than to move it from Marseille to Avignon ­100 kilometres away. Multinationals routinely organize their activity around three “shifts” corresponding to the three main times zones ­Europe, North America and Asia­ and deliver on-line services, data inputting, software writing, help-lines ­from practically anywhere in the world.

A POLITICAL USE OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

In his testament, Alfred Nobel clearly stated that the Peace Prize should be given for the reduction of armies or for understanding among nations.

SPAIN ON THE ROPES

The days of social peace are over. The general strike held on September 29 protesting the labour reforms decided by the government of Prime Minister Zapatero marks the opening of what promises to be a period of social turbulence.

GYPSIES: HUMAN RIGHTS AND EU LAW

A recent European summit degenerated into an unfortunate confrontation within the context of European integration. There was a heated exchange between French president Nicolas Sarkozy and European Commission president and former Portuguese prime minister Jose Manuel Barroso over the expulsion of EU citizens -in this case Romanian citizens (gypsies, 'Roma')- from French territory. The EU justice commissioner, Viviane Reding, compared the act to deportations during World War II. Sarkozy bluntly responded that she could receive in her native Luxembourg all the gypsies she wished. Reding admitted her language was rather exaggerated, but the scandal did not subside.

ON HUNGER, THE ONLY RIGHT NUMBER IS ZERO

With riots in Mozambique and food prices climbing to their highest level in two years, the early Autumn of 2010 made many observers suspect that the world was headed for a repeat of the 2007-2008 food crisis.

IMBALANCES AND FRAGILITY OF THE WORLD ECONOMY

The multiple challenges now faced by the global community can perhaps be summed up in one word: imbalances. Imbalances in food, energy, housing and financial markets were allowed to grow during a sustained economic boom, becoming increasingly interdependent. These mounting imbalances generated a level of economic fragility which eventually shattered with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. But despite the massive amount of public resources that have been mobilized to deal with the resulting collapse, the underlying forces have been left untouched in the aftermath of the crisis. They remain a toxic threat to stable and inclusive growth and the sustainability of the recovery.

BRAZIL: CONTINUITY AND ACCELERATION

Brazil has already achieved well ahead of schedule the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for reducing poverty, one of eight established in September 2000 by 170 heads of state brought together at a United Nations summit in New York. The target date stipulated in the agreement was 2015. In the last eight years Brazil has stepped up implementation of an array of public policies that were designed to eradicate extreme poverty in the country as part of a larger plan that would guarantee both economic development and social inclusion.

FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION: ACHIEVEMENTS AND CHALLENGES

Promoting women's rights at the global level must aim to enhance women's role as pro-active individuals and as the essential and most effective channel for development and peace. However, to achieve this requires protecting women's fundamental rights, first and foremost the right not to be subjected to violence.

US AND UK MEDIA FAIL TO SEE BASQUE ETA AS TERRORIST

A recent editorial of the Financial Times floated the thesis that the prospects for a permanent peace in the Basque country would be strengthened by the execution of two basic acts by the Spanish government: first, lifting the ban preventing the pro-ETA political group Batasuna from participating in elections; and second, transferring incarcerated ETA agents to prisons closer to their homes. The FT argues that delaying restoration of electoral credentials to Batasuna serves only to "prop up ETA's dwindling support" while "the perceived injustice" of imprisonment far from home is "a money spinner for ETA's fundraisers".

POURING WATER IN A BUCKET FULL OF HOLES

In September 2000, the worldÂ's Heads of State and Government adopted the UN Millennium Declaration. Subsequent to the Declaration numerous international agreements and commitments were made to increase aid and provide debt relief in order to speed up the implementation of the MDGs. African Monitor has been tracking performance on these commitments through the issuance of an annual Development Support Monitor (DSM). The 2010 DSM has just been published.