A journalist conducts an interview in Kenya. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Linus Atarah
HELSINKI, May 5 2016 (IPS)

The freedom of the press is a universally cherished democratic right, but what may have been overlooked as the World Day Freedom of Information was celebrated on Wednesday is that the ability of journalists to protect their source is increasingly coming under attack by authorities.

To Julie Posetti, there should be global standard adopted by all countries to protect the source of journalists, a fundamental principle to the capacity to do journalism that supports democracy.

“Journalists can draw on the universal right to freedom of expression and also right to privacy,” says Julie Posetti, editor at the Australia-based Fairfax Media, “what is lacking however, is that there is no international law that specifically enshrines the right to protect journalistic sources as part of this other international human rights framework,” Posetti told IPS.

Speaking at a UNESCO conference to mark the World Press Freedom Day in Helsinki, on Wednesday, Posetti said in some jurisdictions, for instance in Europe, there are regional laws and court judgments that uphold traditional rights to protect sources, but these protections are rather done in an “analogue way” – by which she means the laws need to be updated to take into account the digital reality of today’s world.

This year’s celebration marks the 250^th anniversary of world’s first freedom of information act, due to campaign of Anders Chydenius, a member of parliament and priest, passed in modern day Sweden and Finland. Finland was part of Sweden until 1809, when it was handed over to Czarist Russia as a gift of war.

“The traditional rights of journalistic source might protect your right in court not to identify your source, or your notebook from proceedings, or to hand them over to the police, but not the digital information on one’s laptop or hard drive, all of which can reveal not just one source but many, many sources”, she said.

“It would be wonderful to have an international standard that declared that the protection of journalists sources was fundamental to the right of freedom expression”, she says, “instead what exists are piecemeal references to those right around the world, some very good laws, most are not up to date”.

The protection of a journalist’s source is an ethical principle in journalism recognised globally. People who often approach journalists with sensitive information usually do that at considerable risk, including the risk of losing their lives. Such people would wish to have their identity protected but if journalists cannot guarantee that, then it will have a chilling effect on the public right to information in general.

Some countries have legislation that provides protection to journalistic sources but such legislation is now being undermined by the use of data retention and national security and anti-terrorism policies globally.

According to findings for a book authored by Posetti and published by UNESCO last year, out of 121 countries surveyed for evidence of source protection legislation, 69 percent or 84 countries had inadequate legislation to protect journalistic sources – these laws were undermined by mass and targeted surveillance, anti-terrorism and national security policies and data retention policies.

Patrick Penninckx, Head of Information Society Department in the Council of Europe also expressed similar concerns over the violation of media freedoms in the 47-member Council of Europe, whose main objectives is upholding democracy, the rule of law and human rights.

Members of the Council of Europe include Russia and Azerbaijan but excludes Belorus. Some members are also members of the European Union.

“We are on the wrong path when it comes to freedom of the media”, Penninckx, told IPS. According to him, national legislations in 27 of the 47 members in the Council of Europe are going towards the wrong direction. These individual member countries seem to be saying, ‘why should we have any kind of European body dictate to us or oversee what we are doing if we can decide on that on by ourselves’, Pennickx, said

Therefore these countries are resorting to “legislative nationalism”, rather than accepting international best practice recommended by international institutions, even including the Council of Europe.

And this does not just apply to the “usual suspects”, he said, namely, Turkey, Russia and Azerbaijan, that are more often talked about in terms of suppressing press freedoms. Rather, it is a general tendency among member countries to use terrorism legislation, state of emergency and mass surveillance to diminish rights of individuals and through that put pressure on journalists and other media actors.

Europe is in the midst of multiple crisis – financial, refugee, migration – even some of these countries are in a conflict situation such as Ukraine, but in spite of that Pennickx insists that countries must still uphold human rights and press freedom in times of crisis.

In situations of targeted and mass surveillance there should be a higher threshold, for instance, the need to have a warrant in order to demand a journalist’s metadata. There must also be transparency and accountability in judicial measures, says Posetti.  In certain jurisdiction where judicial hearings take place in a closed court without the awareness of journalists, it is difficult for them to protect their sources.

While in favour of adopting an international standard to protect the sources of journalists, Guy Berger, Director of the Division of Freedom Expression and Media Development in UNESCO points out the difficulties faced by his organisation to bring that about.

UNESCO, being an intergovernmental organisation, he says, can only operate through diplomatic pressure. According to him, it would be considerably difficult to reach a consensus among 195 members of UNESCO to adopt a common legislation to provide journalistic sources. “In this era of concern over terrorism, governments have no appetite for a binding legislation.

“We try to influence with the power of reason and the NGOs and the media have the power of embarrassment; so you bring those together”, Berger told IPS.

“Freedom of information is not a Christmas tree, a gift to be used from time to time. It is an everyday gym exercise,” says Mabel Rehnfeldt, investigative journalist and Editor of ABC-Digital in Paraguay. To her, legislation per se, may not be enough to achieve the goal, rather it should followed advocacy and awareness raising for everyone, including journalists to fully grasp the significance of protecting journalistic sources.

“We need to be activists for the protection of our sources, because that principle is fundamental to our capacity to do journalism that supports democracy, without it we certainly are going to be unable to continue doing the kind of investigative journalism that has the capacity to effect change”, says Posetti.

Activists at a G20 protest say no to 'welfare for the rich’. Credit: Tim and Selena Middleton/CC-BY-2.0

By Linus Atarah
HELSINKI, Oct 6 2012 (IPS)

The City of Helsinki added its voice to a growing global call against corporate tax evasion with the passage of a new responsibility strategy that leaves no room for unethical business practices.

Last week, 85 city councillors from Finland’s capital voted to sever business ties with companies operating in, or having links to, tax havens.

The resolution – which passed 78-4 in the City Council, the country’s highest decision-making body in charge of local affairs – acknowledged that tax evasion undermines the capacity of municipalities to provide social services.

The council also recognised that tax havens deprive developing countries of vital tax revenues and denies them the opportunity to benefit fully from world trade.

Tax havens are either territories or countries whose authorities allow businesses or individuals to deposit their wealth at very low tax rates or, in some cases, pay no taxes at all.

The London-based Tax Justice Network has identified 10 of the most attractive tax havens around the world, including Bahrain, the Cayman Islands, Jersey, Singapore and Switzerland.

Tax havens are quickly becoming an election issue here, as the country prepares to head to the polls for municipal elections in three weeks. Minister of Finance, Jutta Urpilainen of the Social Democratic Party, flagged the topic during a parliamentary discussion Thursday by supporting the proposal that municipalities boycott companies operating in tax havens.

Protecting the welfare state

The recent decision means Helsinki will no longer provide procurement contracts to companies whose operations are located in tax havens.

With a budget of about four billion euros, Helsinki is Finland’s biggest consumer of goods and services but it must now be more wary of who it chooses to do business with by demanding that companies reveal where they operate.

Taxes from enterprises are the primary source of income for Finnish municipalities, enabling them to provide public services such as education, health, housing and care for the elderly.

“Companies operating through tax havens pose a lethal threat to the welfare state in Finland and in all countries, especially in developing countries,” according to the resolution’s author, Thomas Wallgren, a Social Democratic councillor who has been leading the charge against tax havens.

“They also distort fair competition between companies, thereby threatening the survival of local and national small and medium-sized companies,” Wallgren told IPS.

He cited the example of Accra Breweries in Ghana, owned by South Africa’s SAB Miller. For five consecutive years, this multi-billion-dollar company paid no taxes at all to the Ghanaian government, while people who sold empty bottles on the streets paid, and continue to pay, value-added tax and municipal tax.

Implementation of the city council’s resolution may still run up against obstacles, according to legal experts here, who say the issue is compounded by the fact that European Union competition laws do not allow companies to be denied public procurement contracts on the basis of their location in tax havens.

Murky estimates

“The amount of money in tax havens is a big question mark,” Matti Kohonen, a researcher with the Tax Justice Network, told IPS. “We live in a world of high financial secrecy, which is a direct cause of the financial crisis. We don’t know where the money is and that is a very serious problem,” Kohonen said.

He estimates that global financial transactions that are either illicit, or involve some element of criminality or tax evasion, are in the order of one trillion dollars annually, about one-tenth of the United States’ gross domestic product (GDP).

The lost revenue stemming from these actions is somewhere close to 100 billion dollars, the amount the United Nations says is required to fulfil the Millennium Development Goals.

The Tax Justice Networks also estimates that 21 to 36 trillion dollars, about two to three times the GDP of the U.S., are hidden in tax havens.

Transfer pricing

According to Kohonen, another common method for avoiding taxes is through transfer pricing, a price-setting mechanism for selling goods or services between different departments of the same company or between a parent company and its subsidiary.

An estimate released two years ago by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which sets the tax rules for transfer pricing, says this practice constitutes 70 percent of world trade.

This year the Finnish Tax Administration reported that the government loses 320 million euros of tax revenue annually due to price manipulations in transfer pricing. But Kohonen says that may only be the “tip of the iceberg” because most firms operating in tax havens are shrouded in secrecy.

Rather than have global transfer rules decided by the OECD, Kohonen believes it would be far more democratic for the U.N. to determine these regulations.

“It is a scandal that we have rules that govern world trade but no rules for the world of taxation apart from the rich countries’ lobby group, which is the OECD. We need multilateral rules or some other rules on how to tax multinationals,” he stressed.

Global movement

Helsinki’s initiative is not an isolated case but part of a global campaign to galvanise a groundswell of public support that could in turn create sufficient political will to take action against tax havens.

“The whole point of the campaign is to put additional pressure on national authorities, stock exchange regulators and on the European Union to have more stringent requirements for multinational companies,” Kohonen told IPS.

He says Helsinki’s initiative comes hard on the heels of similar measures taken in two Swedish cities, Malmö and Kalmar, as well as the municipality of Ulstein in Norway, all in an attempt to rein in the activities of tax evading companies.

Eight regions in France, including its wealthiest region, Île-de-France, have recently declared themselves ‘tax haven free zones’.

In spite of the legal obstacles impeding the implementation of Helsinki’s city council decision, Wallgren said many other Finnish municipalities have been encouraged by the momentum and are following suit. The decision is “catching on like wild fire” around cities and municipalities, he said.

“The fight against the tax havens will be a long one but because it is also a fight for the survival of the welfare state it is worth fighting,” he added.

Kohonen likened the current movement in Finland to the Jubilee Debt Campaign of 1990, which forced developed countries to reduce poor countries’ debt.

“Once it becomes the focus of millions of people around the globe, politicians can no longer avoid the problem,” he said.

(END)

A basket of condoms passed around during International Women’s Day in Manila. Credit: Kara Santos/IPS

By Linus Atarah
ISTANBUL, May 25 2012 (IPS)

While much of the world is facing a global financial crisis, made worse by government cuts in social spending, members of parliament meeting here Wednesday agreed the economic crunch is no reason for governments to relax their commitment to women’s reproductive rights and health, made 18 years ago.

Speaking at the opening session of the fifth International Parliamentarians Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) said 250 million women around the world do not have access to much-needed family planning services.

“It is not acceptable because every life is worth more than the money that we talk about,” he told conference participants earlier this week.

“We cannot accept that, everyday, 1000 women die during child birth because we know what we have to do and we have the resources to do it.”

All that is needed is the courage to make those resources available to prevent unwanted deaths on such a massive scale, he added.

“We have what it takes to make a difference,” Osotimehin said, referring to the advances in global communications and medical science since 1994, when the world adopted the ICPD Programme of Action to empower women to claim their reproductive rights.

The conference in Turkey, which brought together nearly 300 members of parliament from 110 countries, aims at building on past commitments made in the first ICPD conference held in Cairo, Egypt in 1994.

The Programme of Action adopted nearly two decades ago set a target of reducing maternal mortality by 75 percent by 2015, complementing one of the most urgent targets of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The Parliamentarians’ conference has taken place regularly during the last ten years, bringing together MPs who are committed to population and development issues, the last one being in Addis Ababa in 2009.

According to Osotimehin, the good news is that maternal mortality has been reduced by 47 percent since 1990; still, governments are not doing enough to make reproductive health services widely available to women and young girls.

“Our work is not done,” he said, “until we are able to reach out to that little girl out there drawing water five miles away from her house, who, when she has her regular menstrual period, is sent out of the house because it is unacceptable in (her) culture to be the house.”

Thousands of girls around the world continue to be married off, at the very sight of their first menstrual cycle, to men who are old enough to be their grandfathers. Such girls are denied the opportunity to realise their full potential, Osotimehin told IPS.

Safiye Cagar, director of information and external relations at the UNFPA, said governments are not paying adequate attention to reproductive health services, which are considered “soft issues” and therefore tend to be the first on the budgetary chopping blocks, unlike roads and schools.

But as she pointed out, building infrastructure will have little impact unless it is done in tandem with building a healthy population.

“Even though funding is short, the objectives of the ICPD cannot be allowed to fall (prey) to budgetary cuts,” Cagar stressed.

“Full implementation of the Programme is not optional, it is essential, not just because of human rights but because so many other aspects of economic development hinge on its success,” she told IPS.

Therefore, one of the outcomes of this meeting will be a call for governments to allocate 10 percent of their national budgets to ICPD programmes.

However, Gita Sen, adjunct professor of global health and population at the Harvard School of Public Health, pointed out that the ICPD Programme is itself an unfinished agenda, suffering from fragmentation.

According to her, the ICPD adopted in Cairo had talked about a comprehensive sexual and reproductive health package bolstered by a set of laws and regulations that would protect and promote the reproductive health rights of women.

But she said family planning is still not integrated into issues like maternal mortality, and youth-specific sexual health needs are not being adequately addressed.

The best example of this fragmentation is the global HIV epidemic, which in most places is a “vertical silo sitting by itself” or, at best, running parallel to the rest of the health system.

In reality, however, HIV is as big a part of reproductive rights as anything else. If a woman contracts HIV, she could simultaneously be suffering from domestic violence, she may well have a maternity problem and, most likely, her children will be in dire need of support, according to Sen.

“So gender needs to be integrated around the woman, who (probably) has neither the time nor the capacity to go to different places to receive treatment,” Sen said.

All the different sexual and reproductive health services need to be integrated as one package, which should give priority to family planning.

As far as youth are concerned, the ICPD agenda has failed to deliver.

Despite all the talk about young people, the work being done on the ground to protect and preserve their rights is “next to nothing”, Sen said.

According to a preliminary draft Istanbul Declaration issued by conference participants, the world’s parliamentarians are determined to play their role in mobilising the necessary resources for the ICPD agenda, as well as strengthening parliamentary oversight in ensuring its implementation.

In the draft Declaration, to be finalised and adopted Friday, parliamentarians committed to looking ahead to ensure that future priorities are included in the goals and targets being developed through the Post 2015 development agenda processes.

(END)

When war-torn Somalia was also ravaged by a drought-induced famine last year, which killed tens of thousands and displaced over a million people, international media was quick to blame the Islamist Al-Shabaab for blocking humanitarian assistance from reaching its zone of control in southern Somalia.

Ken Menkhaus, political science professor at Davidson College in North Carolina, blames the USA Patriot Act for blocking aid to Somali famine victims Credit: Linus Atarah/IPS

But according to Ken Menkhaus, professor of Political Science at Davidson College in North Carolina, the United States’ counter-terrorism laws played an equally central role in obstructing assistance from reaching famine victims in desperate need of aid.

Speaking here in a seminar on Wednesday, organised by the Department of the Study of Religions at Helsinki University, Menkhaus said humanitarian organisations suspended food aid delivery to drought- struck areas controlled by Al-Shabaab for fear of violating the USA Patriot Act.

Congress passed the Act in 2001 as part of its response to the Sep. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon and under it, anyone who provides material benefits, even if unwittingly, to a designated terrorist group, could face the most severe penalties.

Given that Al-Shabaab – the Somali cell of the militant Islamist Al-Qaeda, fighting the Federal Transitional Government (FTG) in Somalia and controlling vast swathes of the south except the capital Mogadishu – is designated a terrorist organisation by the U.S., humanitarian groups were fearful that an accusation of ‘aiding terrorists’ could damage their entire organisation.

Thus many reached the conclusion that they were too vulnerable to operate in Al-Shabaab-controlled areas.

Though the group undoubtedly prevented assistance from reaching starving famine victims based on its claim that food aid was a Western conspiracy to drive Somali farmers out of business, Menkhaus, a specialist on the Horn of Africa, believes that was not the end of the sordid story.

“There are plenty of western countries, including my own government, who would like to see the conversation stop right there and say it was all Al-Shabaab’s fault.” However, the other bottleneck was U.S. policy, which “de facto criminalises any transactions in southern Somalia,” he said.

Other countries have similar laws, but since the U.S. supplies the bulk of food aid to Somalia, it has the heaviest impact on the country.

In a twist of tragic irony, “suspension of food aid into southern Somalia was the only thing that the U.S. government and Al-Shabaab could agree on, to the detriment of (millions) of Somalis,” Menkhaus told IPS.

In reality, the U.S. could have issued a waiver, protecting relief agencies from counter-terrorism laws; similar waivers have been issued for relief agencies in southern Lebanon and the West Bank of the occupied Palestinian territories, where Hezbollah and Hamas operate respectively.

But in the case of Somalia, Menkhaus believes the U.S. administration did not want to give its Republican opponents any political leverage on the eve of upcoming presidential elections by appearing too “soft on terrorism”.

Instead, the U.S. government prepared a document that purportedly gave relief agencies protection from the law but which, upon close examination by legal experts, was found to contain no such protections, leaving those humanitarian agencies vulnerable to attack under the Patriot Act.

Recent forecasts indicate that Somalia could soon be facing another drought, which could produce yet another food crisis in the country this year. There is now an urgent need for preemptive decisions, by the U.S. government in particular, to avoid another humanitarian catastrophe, Menkhaus said.

Al-Shabab waning?

A Somali national working with an aid agency on the ground in the south of the country, who did not want to be identified because of concern for his safety, told IPS that Al-Shabaab is gradually losing support as increasing numbers of Somalis are beginning to resent the group’s forcible recruitment policy and suicide bombings.

Formed in 2008 to resist the invasion of neighbouring Ethiopian forces, Al-Shabaab was once a popular movement, seen as a legitimate force to oust an invading army in the face of the FTG’s inaction. It had also brought law and order to several regions torn asunder by warring gangs of warlords.

However, Menkhaus said that the group has been seriously weakened by multiple military defeats at the hands of the 12,000 African Union peacekeepers in the country; and its tactic of deploying suicide bombers among the civilian population is alienating much of the group’s former support base.

Abdi-Rashid, who did not want his full identity revealed, accused Western governments of exacerbating what he described as the “politicisation of aid in Somalia”, whereby the humanitarian agenda is becomes secondary to the political agenda.

Huge importance has been heaped on the civil war and the “security situation”, much of it with good reason: by 2008 Somalia was the most dangerous place in the world for humanitarian aid workers.

“One-third of all humanitarian casualties occurred not in Afghanistan or in Iraq but in Somalia,” Menkhaus said.

Still, this was no excuse to allow famine victims to perish en masse, he stressed.

“Long term development work should still go on in spite of the conflict” to secure people’s basic human rights to tangible things like “schools and drinking wells”, Abdi-Rashid told IPS.

If such long-term issues are ignored much longer, there will be serious consequences not only for Somalia but for the entire region.

“These famines – the ones we had last year and the one we may have in 2012 – are producing seismic changes (including) the loss of viable livelihoods in rural southern Somalia, sending waves of people across the borders into Kenya and Ethiopia,” added Abdi-Rashid.

The Kenyan refugee camp of Dadaab, with a population of 520,000, is now Kenya’s third largest city, and completely unsustainable.

Meanwhile, destitute nomads and farmers who can no longer find livelihoods in rural areas are drifting into urban centres. These people, who come with no technical skills into a barren employment landscape, are forming huge slums of several hundred thousand people in villages that previous housed only a few thousand residents.

“This is a time bomb for Somalia because not only Al-Shabaab but any armed group or criminal gang (will) find ready recruits in these sprawling urban slums,” Abdi-Rashid concluded.

In the midst of the debt and financial crises plaguing key European countries, Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja has joined a growing international chorus calling for the introduction of a global financial market tax and the shutting down of tax havens, saying all that is needed is the political will to do it.

Tuomioja was addressing participants at an international conference in the Finnish capital Tuesday, convened to review the ideas and proposals of the Helsinki Process launched ten years ago. The two-day conference was attended by a broad range of international financial experts, academics and representatives of international civil society organisations.

The minister said the EU is now in the midst of an intense debate on a financial tax that is no longer an intellectual discussion of the issues but a more serious political attempt to introduce a tax of this kind at the European level.

And public support for the measure is stronger than ever before among the European public, he stressed.

Tuomioja’s call comes on the heels of open declarations of support for the tax by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. However, there is not yet a consensus in the EU, with Britain being the staunchest opponent.

“Two key areas of the global economy where determined and concrete measures are required to enhance stability and inequity are the regulation of the financial markets and particularly issues related to taxation and tax flows,” the foreign minister said.

“Neither of these is impossible; everything depends on political will,” he told IPS.

“The Finnish government is committed to work towards increased stability, transparency and accountability of the international financial markets. We urge that an international financial market tax be introduced on as wide a geographical basis as possible,” said Tuomioja.

The other key area, he said, is the establishment of a global investment agreement negotiated with the full participation of developing countries and taking into account the needs of the environment, consumer protection, human rights and core labour standards in accordance with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) conventions and other international agreements.

The Finnish government, according to Tuomioja, will advocate the closure of tax havens by requiring, for instance, strict obligatory reporting by multilateral enterprises and exchange of information between public authorities.

“We are in favour of a stricter control of the financial markets, tighter solvency regulations and the prevention of non-transparent accumulation of risks,” he said.

Launched in 2002, the Helsinki Process on Globalisation and Democracy was a joint initiative of the Finnish and Tanzanian governments based on the premises that different stakeholders all have a role to play in solving global problems. A final report of the process was submitted to the U.N. secretary-general in September 2008.

The Helsinki Process aspired to go beyond traditional international decision-making and find ways of engaging stakeholders in open dialogue.

As a contribution to global problem-solving, it sought to provide a new kind of equal forum for all stakeholders from the industrialised North and developing South to discuss common issues of concern and devise practical and feasible proposals for addressing the issues identified and mobilising the political will and resources to implement the proposal.

In spite of incremental steps forward, participants agreed that the Helsinki Process has not changed the world or radically transformed the multilateral system, although its unique strategy of using a multi-stakeholder approach to international dialogue is an important legacy left to international diplomacy.

According to Tanzanian Foreign Minister Bernard Membe, one success story of the Helsinki Process is the multi-stakeholder approach that has been used as the principal tool to resolve international crises.

The approach relies on inclusive participation by civil society, academia, the media and governments to seek answers to international issues.

“It is one achievement of the Helsinki Process; we have set in motion a strategy to resolve issues and it has stood the test of time,” Membe said.

“The Helsinki Process is not dead, there is trust in it, and there is confidence, and it needs to be kept alive,” he added.

Tuomioja reminded participants that at the very inception of the Helsinki Process, one of the practical recommendations put forward in 2005 on the new approaches to global problem-solving was the replacement of the G7 (Group of Seven most industrialised nations) with a broader group of countries, the G20, which holds an annual summit of the leading governments of the North and South.

It was suggested that this leader-level group could act as an effective coordination mechanism for global economic governance with coherence and legitimacy.

“It would be a slight exaggeration,” said Tuomioja, “to claim that the Helsinki Process was the initial cradle of the idea of the G20 summit concept, but definitely it was put on the global agenda.”

The G20 is now a reality, he said, and the focus is now on how to make it more legitimate.

While some steps have been taken by the G20 in various areas, analysts agree that they have been far too few and have had a limited effect on the harsh realities of the global economy. Nonetheless it is clear that the emergence of the G20 constitutes a stride forward in establishing a coherent mechanism for global economic governance.

According to Tuomioja, a global tax on financial market transactions is within the spirit of the Helsinki Process, in the search for a solution to global economic governance.

Participants also agreed that one other concrete achievement of the Helsinki Process is the establishment of the Institute of African Leadership for Sustainable Development in Dar es Salaam, which according to Membe was “a dignified exit of the Helsinki Process.”

One of the goals of the Institute, which was launched in 2010, is to support African leaders in striving to attain sustainable development in their countries. It seeks to build the skills and knowledge of African leaders and policy-makers so that they may define development policies which are tailored to their country’s identity, vision and specific needs.

However, Susan George of the Amsterdam-based think tank Transnational Institute said the G20 has been too timid to do anything for regulating financial regulation, because the financial industry spends five billion dollars a year lobbying against regulation.

“Finance cannot self-regulate,” she said.

In order to avoid a future global financial crisis of similar magnitude to the current one, Professor Tony Addison of the World Institute of Development Economic Research (WIDER), which forms part of the United Nations University, suggested that governments should reduce the size of individual private banks, which are considered too numerous and too big to fail.

Instead, what is needed are more public development banks which serve public and social needs, he said.

“The Financial Transaction Tax is no panacea to what we are faced with today if too many private banks are allowed to exist and yet are considered too big to fail,” he said.

Tuomioja also raised concern over the need for a global agreement on investment, the absence of which is hurting small, powerless developing countries.

“In the absence of a global agreement on investment we have seen an immense proliferation of bilateral investment agreements. Now we are faced with a virtual jungle of thousands of investment agreements, and it is always the weaker parties who are the ones suffering from this situation,” the minister said.

He argued that an investment agreement negotiated with the full participation of developing countries, with the right balance regarding the rights of governments, and taking into proper account the need to ensure respect for environmental, consumer and labour standards as well as corporate social responsibility, is very much needed.

The Helsinki Process was launched in the aftermath of the MAI – the ill-fated Multilateral Agreement on Investment which was negotiated in secret within the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) but eventually abandoned due to fierce civil society opposition.

According to Tuomioja, the MAI was an example of how multilateral processes can fail, partly due to a complete lack of multi-stakeholder dialogue and cooperation.

But while agreeing on the need for an investment agreement that properly takes into account the needs of developing countries, Martin Khor, executive director of the South Centre, a Geneva-based inter-governmental think tank for developing countries, called instead for reforms of existing rules on investment which have already been negotiated at the bilateral level, which he said is doable from the start.

He also called for emergency financing for developing countries when they are hit with an international crisis that causes their export earnings or commodity prices to collapse through no fault of their own.

In addition, Khor called for the regulation of international capital flows because, he stated, they are the gateway for speculation into developing countries, which he said should be provided with the policy space to control such flows.

Tuomioja said that “In terms of achievements, whether it (the Helsinki Process) is half-empty or half-full, at least the glass is there and we have to continue filling it on the basis of the ideas we have.”

In an uncharacteristically lively election campaign in this nation of five million people, Finns head for the polls in a second round of voting Sunday to elect a new president.

None of the eight presidential candidates emerged as clear winner in the first round of voting last month, hence the second round.

Sauli Niinistö, 64, of the conservative National Coalition Party who was tipped as favourite won 37 percent of the vote n the first round while Pekka Haavisto, 53, of the Green League caused a major upset by unexpectedly coming second with 18.8 percent.

With intensive use of social media such as Facebook, flashmob stunts and live music concerts, this year’s campaign has been more lively than previous ones. But voter turnout of 72 percent is still lower than the 74 percent six years ago.

The contest in the second round is now between Niinistö, a former finance minister and speaker in parliament in the last government, and Haavisto, former development cooperation minister and special EU representative to Darfur, Sudan. Niinistö lost in the second round in 2006 when outgoing President Tarja Halonen won her second term.

Polls published here Wednesday indicate that Niinistö is the clear frontrunner predicted to win 62 percent of the vote while Haavisto is expected to take 38 percent.

Jan Sundberg, professor of political science in the University of Helsinki says that the gap between the candidates will narrow in the final stages, though he concedes that Haavisto is the underdog.

“Niinistö has more resources and more people working for him, so it is clear that Haavisto is the underdog, added to the fact that he is gay which is a problem for most conservative and older people,” Sundberg told IPS.

Haavisto has been living in a registered partnership with an immigrant from Ecuador. For some voters this may be a problem, but it never developed into an election issue. His vote of nearly 19 percent far exceeded the overall national support for his party.

The contest between Haavisto and Niinistö brings the curtain down on 30 years of domination of the Social Democratic Party in Finnish presidential politics, starting with Mauno Koivisto in 1982 and followed by Nobel laureate Martti Ahtisaari and Tarja Halonen, the first female president in 2000.

The Social Democrats candidate, former prime minister Paavo Lipponen, faced a stunning defeat, picking up only 6.7 percent of the vote in the first round. This surprised people even outside his party.

An equally surprising early exit in the race was former foreign minister and Eurosceptic Paavo Väyrynen of the Centre Party, who was earlier tipped to win second place but was edged out in a last-minute surge for Haavisto.

Political analysts here say Väyrynen’s vigorous campaign, coupled with his anti-European stand, drew voters away from the anti-immigrant and populist True Finns Party whose phenomenal success in last year’s parliamentary elections rocked the Finnish political establishment. The party leader and presidential candidate Timo Soini finished in fourth place with only 9 percent of the vote.

Hopes for a female candidate to continue outgoing Tarja Halonen’s 12-year presidency were extinguished in the first round when the only two female candidates, Eva Biaudet of the Swedish People’s Party (RKP) and Sari Essayah of the Christian Democrats got only 2.7 and 2.5 percent respectively.

Political analysts here have observed that Sunday’s vote will be historic in the sense that for the first time it has not shaped into a battle between left and right as in all previous direct-election presidential campaigns.

Until now, the second round of voting has always pitted a candidate of the Social Democrats or a common champion of the left against a representative of the non-socialist camp.

The Finnish president no longer has a say in domestic policy which is mainly the responsibility of the parliamentary government. Constitutional amendments within the last decade have whittled down the powers of the president. Presidential powers are now limited to foreign policy and defence, exercised in conjunction with the government.

The two candidates do not differ significantly in their foreign policy views, according to Sundberg.

Haavisto, says Sundberg, is as a member of the Green Party more concerned with international environmental issues, conflict resolution and development assistance. Niinistö is more of an establishment figure whose views on Finland’s relations with the European Union are more in line with the current government.

“Whatever the case, the candidates are not going to be elected based on their foreign policy views but rather on their profiles and personal issues and what people think about how they can fit into the position,” says Sundberg.

In the face of a global recession that has not yet run its course, there is growing demand now for an economic model away from reliance on continued growth.

Continued economic growth as a way of producing prosperity has been written into the DNA of the market economy. But that economic model is pushing the planet to an ecological cliff, experts warn.

“This idea that a secure growing economy would look after our children and their children forever has been a bit of an illusion,” Tim Jackson, professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey in Britain tells IPS. “We have put all our economic eggs into this particular economic model and it has failed on its own terms.”

Data from 1900-2005 shows that the use of energy and materials, including fossil fuels, doubled for the first 50 years of the 20th century, and in the second 50 years increased by 700 percent.

The material and energy that enter the system are disposed of as waste back to the environment, and that is placing an excessive burden on the biosphere.

“Growth of the kind that we are used to is not feasible; we are either going to confront a crisis because we continue striving for growth that we can’t have, or we have to think about alternatives,” says Peter Victor, professor of environmental studies at York University in Britain.

Robert Solow, Nobel economics laureate and one of the founders of modern growth theory believes “there is no reason that capitalism could not survive with slow or even no growth.”

According to Solow, “it is possible that the U.S. and Europe will find that either continuoud growth will be too destructive to the environment and they are too dependent on scarce natural resources, or they would rather use increasing productivity in the form of leisure.”

The shift is also noticeable in the language of key economic institutions such as the World Economic Forum. Prior to the recent financial crisis its language was about growth, and about productivity and the institutions that could maintain that.

But this year in Davos, Switzerland, where the World Economic Forum holds its annual gatherings, there was a subtle shift in language because it barely mentioned growth at all, and talked more instead about economic security, resilient economies, and about the need for sustainability.

“Even if the attempt to get business as usual back is quite strong now as the financial crisis appears to be receding, the undercurrent is actually changed, and we are in a different place,” says Jackson.

But the idea of degrowth has its critics. Sixten Korkman, director of the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (ETLA), says degrowth is incompatible with market economy and with democracy. “Growth simply means to do new things, more clever things, better things to change the structure of the economy, hopefully towards more services, be they social services or cultural services.”

According to him, a combination of appropriate incentives in a market economy would channel money into ecological investments, but this hasn’t happened because environmental taxes have not been set to the scale needed to create an impact.

Victor argues that this may be because the pursuit of growth is set as the standard. “Therefore unless we can divert our attention away from the pursuit of growth as traditionally defined, we won’t come around to doing things that economists have been proposing for a long time about how to fix prices.”

Advocating degrowth also raises eyebrows in the poorer countries where economic growth is seen as the main instrument for poverty reduction. But Victor and others in the degrowth movement say their focus is the rich countries. “It is not a prescription for poorer countries,” Victor tells IPS.

On the contrary, he says, when rich countries insist on expanding the size and scale of their economies, they make it impossible for the poorer countries to get access to the resources, to the energy and even to the food that they need. Degrowth and fighting poverty in the poorer countries are therefore closely related.

“Growth can bring in important benefits to poorer countries, but they cannot achieve that if the rich countries try to stay ahead.”