By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 7 2015 (IPS)

As part of a politically-amusing annual ritual, the guessing game is on at the United Nations: will he, or will he not, address the General Assembly, along with more than 150 heads of state who are due in New York next month?

Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who has been indicted on war crimes charges by the International Criminal Court (ICC), is reportedly toying with the idea of defying the international community once again – as he did in South Africa in June — and appearing before the U.N.’s highest policy making body when it begins its general debate, come Sep. 28.“Even though we’re not a party to the Rome statute of the ICC, we have strongly supported the ICC’s efforts to hold accountable those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity and genocide in Darfur. So I’ll just leave it at that.” -- U.S. State Department deputy spokesperson Mark Toner

This will be his third attempt to address the General Assembly, the last two being aborted.

However, his proposed visit to New York this time has been accompanied, as usual, by a rash of widespread rumours: will he be arrested on his way from the airport and handed over to the ICC? Does the United States, which is not a party to the ICC statute, have the legitimate right to do so?

Elise Keppler, Acting Director, International Justice Programme at Human Rights Watch, told IPS, “Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir belongs in one place only, the International Criminal Court, where he faces outstanding warrants for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Darfur.”

“A visit by al-Bashir to the U.N. would not only be an affront to Darfuri victims, but a brazen challenge to the U.N. Security Council, which was responsible for sending Darfur to the ICC for investigation in the first place in 2005,” she added.

Still, will the U.S. Embassy in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum provide him with an entry visa which the United States has rarely denied to visiting heads of state because it is mandated to facilitate the working of the United Nations under what is called the Headquarters Agreement with the host country?

But so far neither the United Nations nor the U.S. State Department is willing to provide any answers.

Asked about the proposed visit, Mark Toner, the U.S. State Department’s deputy spokesperson told reporters: “We’ve seen reports that President Bashir plans to speak at the U.N. summit in September – Summit for Development. We don’t have any further information at this time.”

“We can’t, frankly, talk about individual visa cases or disclose any details from it. We’re prohibited by law from doing so,” he said.

More broadly, “Even though we’re not a party to the Rome statute of the ICC, we have strongly supported the ICC’s efforts to hold accountable those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity and genocide in Darfur. So I’ll just leave it at that.”

Asked if the Sudanese president will be arrested if he arrived in New York, Toner said: “Again, I’m not going to get out and speak to hypotheticals. We haven’t received any word that he’s intending to go there. And frankly, if we did, I couldn’t speak to it from here. Sorry about that.”

Addressing the U.N.’s Legal Committee last year, Hassan Ali, a senior Sudanese diplomat, told delegates, “The democratically-elected president of Sudan, Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, had been deprived of the opportunity to participate in the General Assembly (last year) because the host country, the United States, had denied him a visa, in violation of the U.N.-U.S. Headquarters Agreement.”

Furthermore, he complained, the host country also applied arbitrary pressures on foreign missions, “depending on how close a country’s foreign policy is to that of the United States.”

“It was a great and deliberate violation of the Headquarters Agreement,” he said, also pointing to the closing of bank accounts of foreign missions and diplomats as another violation.

“Those missions have now been without bank accounts for some three years,” he added.

A denial of a U.S. visa amounts to violations of specific international agreements such as the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961, and particularly the U.N. Headquarters Agreement, entered into by the U.S. and the U.N. in 1947 and unanimously ratified by Congress.

In response to the U.S. refusal to grant a visa to Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat in 1988, the General Assembly had to move its meeting to Geneva at huge expense and inconvenience.

In June al-Bashir, in complete defiance of the international community, participated in an African Union (AU) summit meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa.

But he left the country hours before a South African court issued an interim order to prevent the president from leaving the country.

Peppered with questions early this week, U.N. Deputy Spokesperson Farhan Haq, was non-committal.

“Well, I don’t speak on behalf of the ICC, but what is clear and what the Secretary-General has said repeatedly is that he believes that the Member States of the U.N. system need to take the warrant issued by the International Criminal Court seriously, and, of course, as you know, there are relevant resolutions of the Security Council also about this matter, which we expect the Member States will abide by.”

Asked if al-Bashir will be visiting the U.N., Haq said “Well…at this stage, I’m not… I’m not aware that this is confirmed. I am aware of what the (Sudanese) Permanent Mission has said on this, but at this stage, I’m not aware of what the arrangements are for this.”

“And we’ll have to see how that goes. But certainly, we have continued to treat the matter of the ICC prosecutions regarding Darfur seriously, and we believe all Member States should do so,” he added.

Pressed further on the issue of a U.S. visa, Haq said the basic understanding is that the Heads of State and Government who come for the general debate will be able to come to the United States in order to speak (at the U.N.)

“As you know, there have been some disputes about this over the years, but the general rule has been that,” he noted.

Asked if the United States could refuse a visa and not let him into the country, or arrest him at the airport, even though the U.S. is not a signatory to the ICC, Haq said: “That would essentially be a matter to ask the United States Government… I wouldn’t comment on what they may or may not do.”

Asked if it is his understanding that immunity would attach to all Heads of State in transit between the arrival point in the United States and the U.N. Headquarters, Haq said, “It is basically a question based on a speculative question, so I wouldn’t go further on that realm of speculation.”

“Regarding the issue of immunity, that is covered in a number of treaties including the Vienna Conventions, and I would just refer you to those,” he said.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

By James A. Paul
NEW YORK, Jun 24 2015 (IPS)

It is hard to imagine today the public enthusiasm that greeted the founding of the U.N. in 1945.  After massive suffering and social collapse resulting from the Second World War, the U.N. seemed almost miraculous – a means at last to build peace, democracy, and a just society on a global scale.

Courtesy of Global Policy Forum

Everywhere, hopes and aspirations were high.  Seven decades later, results have fallen far short.  On this anniversary, we can ask: what might have been possible and what is still possible from this institution that has inspired such passion, positive and negative, over the years?

The organisation, of course, was not set up by the United States and its allies to fulfill the wishes of utopian thinkers.  Though the Charter of 1945 invokes “We the Peoples,” the war victors structured the U.N. as a conclave of nation states that would express the will of its members – particularly themselves, the richest and most influential countries.

Despite statesmen’s pronouncements about noble intentions, the U.N.’s most mighty members have never seriously considered laying down their arms or sharing their wealth in an unequal world.  They have been busy instead with the “Great Games” of the day – like securing oil and other resources, dominating client states and bringing down unfriendly governments.Faced with urgent needs and few resources, the U.N. holds out its beggar’s bowl for what amounts to charitable contributions, now totaling nearly half of the organisation’s overall expenditures.

Nevertheless, through the years, the U.N. has regularly attracted the hopes of reforming intellectuals, NGOs, humanitarians and occasionally even some governments – with ideas about improvement to the global system and well-being on the planet. In the run-up to the Fiftieth Anniversary in 1995, many reports, conferences and books proposed U.N. institutional reform, some of which advocated a direct citizen role in the organisation.

Among the ideas were a chamber of directly-elected representatives, a vitalised General Assembly and a more representative Security Council, shorn of vetoes.  Some thinkers wanted an institution “independent” from – or at least buffered against – the sordid arena of great power politics.  But most reforming ideas, including relatively moderate changes, have come to naught.

Governments of all stripes have had a very short-term perspective and a narrow, outmoded conception of their “national interest” in the international arena.  They have shown remarkably little creativity and far-sightedness and they have taken care not to threaten powerful status quo interests.

The U.N.’s seventieth anniversary has come at a moment of exhaustion and frustration among reformers that has sapped belief in creative change. We are at a low-point in U.N. institutional prestige and public support.  Not surprisingly, the organisation has attracted few proposals and initiatives this time around.

As we know, the planet is facing unprecedented problems that the U.N. is in business to address: poverty, gross inequality, civil wars, mass migration, economic instability, and worsening climate change.  Secretaries General have regularly appointed panels of distinguished persons to consider these “threats,” but member states have not been ready to produce effective solutions.

Most of the money and energy at the U.N. in recent years has poured into “peacekeeping,” which is typically a kind of military intervention outsourced by Washington and its allies. The organisation, dedicated in theory to ending war, is ironically now a big actor on the world’s battlefields. It has a giant logistics base in southern Italy, a military communications system, contracts with mercenaries, an intelligence operation, drones, armored vehicles and other accouterments of armed might.  Meanwhile, the Department of Disarmament Affairs has seen its funding and status decline considerably.

The richest and most powerful states like to blame the smaller and poorer countries for the U.N. reform impasse (fury at the “G-77” – the group of “developing” countries – can often be heard among well-fed Northern diplomats at posh New York restaurants).  But in fact the big powers (with Washington first among them) have been the most ardent “blockers” – strenuously opposed to a strong U.N. in nearly every respect, except military operations.

The big power blocking has been especially strong when it comes to global economic policy, including proposals to strengthen the Social and Economic Council.  The same powers have also kept the U.N. Environment Programme weak, while opposing progress in U.N.-sponsored climate negotiations.

Poor countries have complained, but they are not paragons of reform either: their  leaders are inclined to speak in empty populist rhetoric, demanding “aid” while pursuing personal enrichment. We are far from a game-changing “new Marshall Plan” or a global mobilisation for social justice that reformers rightly call for.  Well-meaning NGOs repeat regularly such ideas, with little effect, in comfortable conference venues.

The U.N. has weakened as its member states have grown weaker.  The IMF, the World Bank and global financial interests have pushed neo-liberal reforms for three decades, undermining national tax systems and downsizing the role of public institutions in economic and social affairs.  Governments have privatized banks, airlines and industries, of course, and they have also privatized schools, roads, postal services, prisons and health care.

The vast new inequalities have led to more political corruption, a plague of lobbying, and frequent electoral malfeasance, even in the oldest democracies.  As a result, nation states command less loyalty, respect and hope than they did in the past.  Traditional centrist parties are losing their voters and the public is sceptical about governing institutions at all levels, including the U.N.

When nations cut their budgets, they cut the budget of the U.N. too, small as it is.  Bold steps to improve the U.N. would require money, self-confidence and a long-term view, but member states are too weak, politically unstable, timid and financially insecure to take on such a task.  As states slouch into socially, economically and politically conservative policies, the U.N. inexorably follows, losing its public constituency in the process.

Tightening U.N. budgets have tilted the balance of power in the U.N. even more sharply towards the richest nations and the wealthiest outside players.  Increasingly, faced with urgent needs and few resources, the U.N. holds out its beggar’s bowl for what amounts to charitable contributions, now totaling nearly half of the organization’s overall expenditures.

This “extra-budgetary” funding, enables the donors to define the projects and set the priorities.  The purpose of common policymaking among all member states has been all but forgotten.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Part Two of this article can be found here.

Excerpt:

His Holiness Pope Francis departs Malacañan Palace aboard a Pope Mobile after the Welcome Ceremony for the State Visit and Apostolic Journey to the Republic of the Philippines on January 16, 2015. Credit: Malacañang Photo Bureau/public domain

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 18 2015 (IPS)

Judging by his recent public pronouncements – including on reproductive health, biodiversity, the creation of a Palestinian state, the political legitimacy of Cuba and now climate change – Pope Francis may upstage more than 150 world leaders when he addresses the United Nations, come September.

“The Pope will most likely be the headline-grabber,” predicts one longtime U.N. watcher, “particularly if he continues to be as outspoken as he has been so far.”“The failure of global summits on the environment make it plain that our politics are subject to technology and finance.” -- Pope Francis

As his mostly socio-political statements become increasingly hard-hitting, the Argentine-born Il Papa, the first Pope from the developing world, is drawing both ardent supporters and hostile critics.

Last January, during a trip to Asia, he dropped a bombshell when he said Catholics should practice responsible parenthood and stop “breeding like rabbits.”

In the United States, the Pope has been criticised by right-wing conservatives for playing a key behind-the-scenes role in the resumption of U.S. diplomatic relations with Cuba, and incurred the wrath of the pro-Israeli lobby for recognising Palestine as a nation state.

In fact, most of his pronouncements are closely in line with the United Nations – and specifically its socio-economic agenda.

In his 184-page Encyclical released Thursday, the Pope says “Our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience.”

“Faced with the global deterioration of the environment, I want to address every person who inhabits this planet. In this Encyclical, I especially propose to enter into discussion with everyone regarding our common home.”

The Pope also complains how weak international political responses have been.

“The failure of global summits on the environment make it plain that our politics are subject to technology and finance,” he said.

There are too many special interests, and economic interests easily end up trumping the common good and manipulating information so that their own plans will not be affected, the Pope declared.

Speaking on the global environment last year, he said: “The monopolising of lands, deforestation, the appropriation of water, inadequate agro-toxics are some of the evils that tear man from the land of his birth.”

“Climate change, the loss of biodiversity and deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness,” he added.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who has consistently warned against the devastating effects of climate change, praised Pope Francis for his papal encyclical which highlights that “climate change is one of the principal challenges facing humanity, and that it is a moral issue requiring respectful dialogue with all parts of society.”

He agreed with the encyclical’s findings that there is “a very solid scientific consensus” showing significant warming of the climate system and that most global warming in recent decades is “mainly a result of human activity”.

Ban urged governments to place the global common good above national interests and to adopt an ambitious, universal climate agreement in Paris this year.

Tim Gore, Oxfam International Climate Adviser, told IPS the Pope has set out how climate change is at its most basic a moral issue – it is a deep injustice that the pollution of the world’s richest people and countries drives harmful climate disruption in the poorest communities and countries.

“Anyone that is concerned about injustice should rightly be concerned about climate change, and in making his call, the Pope joins many other leaders of faith, civil society and trade unions. Climate change is all of our business,” he said.

Janet Redman, director of the Climate Policy Programme at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, said: “Pope Francis is crystal clear — the current development model, based on the intensive use of coal, oil, and even natural gas, has to go. In its place, we need renewable sources of energy and new modes of production and consumption that rein in global warming.”

Taxing carbon, divesting from fossil fuels, and ending public corporate welfare for polluters can help end the stranglehold dirty energy companies have on our governments, economies and societies, she added.

In a statement released Thursday, former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, currently chair of the Africa Progress Panel and Kofi Annan Foundation, said as Pope Francis reaffirms, climate change is an all-encompassing threat.

“It is a threat to our security, our health, and our sources of fresh water and food. Such conditions could displace tens of millions of people, dwarfing current migration and fuelling further conflicts,” Annan said.

“I applaud the Pope for his strong moral and ethical leadership. We need more of such inspired leadership. Will we see it at the climate summit in Paris?,” he added.

In the United States, the criticisms have come mostly from right-wing conservatives, who want the Pope to confine himself to religion, not politics.

Representative Jeff Duncan, a Republican from South Carolina and a strong supporter of Israel, said Pope Francis should avoid the Palestine debate altogether – the Vatican should focus on spiritual matters and stay out of politics.

Asked Tuesday, just ahead of the Pope’s statement on climate change, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who is running for the Republican nomination for the U.S. presidency, said: “I think religion ought to be about making us better as people, less about things [that] end up getting into the political realm.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

By Prem Shankar Jha
NEW DELHI, Jun 2 2015 (IPS)

The euphoria that spread though the world after the Iran nuclear agreement reached in Lausanne in April this year with the United States, Russia, China, France, United Kingdom and Germany, plus the European Union, is  proving short-lived.

Republicans in the U.S. Congress have made it clear that they will spare no effort to block it.  Hilary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s presidential hopeful, is keeping her options open. Whispers are escaping from European chancelleries that the sanctions on Iran will only be lifted in stages. Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani have responded by insisting that they must be lifted “at once”.

Prem Shankar Jha

But the agreement’s most inveterate enemy is Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel. In the week that followed the Lausanne agreement, he warned the American public in three successive speeches that the agreement would “threaten the survival of Israel” and increase the risk of a “horrific war”. This is a brazen attempt to whip up fear and war hysteria on the basis of a spider’s web of misinformation.

Netanyahu is not new to this game. At the U.N. General Assembly in 2012, he unveiled a large cartoon of a bomb and drew a red line across it, just below the neck. This was how close Iran was to making a nuclear bomb, he said. It could get there in a year. Only much later did the world learn that Mossad, Netanyahu’s own intelligence service, had told him that Iran was very far from being able to build a bomb.

Mossad probably knew what a U.S. Congress Research Service (CRS) report revealed two months later:  that although Iran already had enough five percent, or low-enriched,  uranium in August 2012 to build  five to seven bombs, it had not enriched enough of it to the intermediate level of  20 percent to meet the requirement for even one  bomb. The CRS had concluded from this and other evidence that this was because  Iran had made no effort to revive its nuclear weapons programme after stopping it ‘abruptly’ in 2003.“[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu is following a two-pronged strategy: first to get the U.S. Congress to insert clauses in the nuclear treaty draft that Iran will be forced to reject, and second to take advantage of the spike in paranoia that will follow to push the West into an attack on Iran”

Another of Netanyahu’s deceptions is that he only wants to punish Iran with sanctions until it gives up trying to acquire not only nuclear weapons but any nuclear technology that could even remotely facilitate this in the future. However, he knows that no government in Iran can agree to this, so what he is really trying to steer the world towards is the alternative – a military attack on Iran.

What is more, because he also knows that destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities will not destroy its capacity to rebuild these in the future, he does not want the attack to end until it has destroyed Iran’s infrastructure (as Israel destroyed southern Lebanon’s in 2006), its industry, its research facilities and its science universities.

He knows that Israel cannot undertake such a vast operation without the United States. But there is one stumbling block – President Barack Obama – who has learned from his recent experience that, to put it mildly, U.S. interests do not always tally with those of its allies in the Middle East.

So Netanyahu is following a two-pronged strategy: first to get the U.S. Congress to insert clauses in the nuclear treaty draft that Iran will be forced to reject, and second to take advantage of  the spike in paranoia that will follow to push the West into an attack on Iran.

He has been joined in this endeavour by another steadfast friend of the United States – Saudi Arabia. At the end of February, Saudi Arabia quietly signed an agreement with Israel that will allow its warplanes to overfly Saudi Arabia on their way to bombing Iran. This has halved the distance they will need to fly. Then, four weeks later, on Mar. 26,  it declared war on the Houthis in Yemen, whom it has been relentlessly portraying as a tiny minority bent upon taking Yemen over through sheer terror, with the backing of  Iran.

This is a substantial oversimplification, and therefore distortion, of a complicated relationship.

Iran may well be helping the Houthis, but not because they are Shias.  The Houthis, who make up 30 percent of Yemen’s population, are Zaidis, a very different branch of Shi’a-ism than the one practised in Iran, Pakistan and India. They inhabit a region that stretches across Saada, the northernmost district of Yemen, and three adjoining principalities, Jizan, Najran and Asir, that Saudi Arabia annexed in 1934.

The internecine wars that Yemeni Houthis have fought since the 1960s have not been sectarian, or even against the Saudis specifically, but in quest of independence and, more recently, a federal state. This is a goal that several other tribes share.  

The timing of Saudi Arabia’s attack, four weeks after its overflight agreement with Israel, and its incessant portrayal of the Houthis as proxies of Iran, hints at a deeper understanding between it and Israel. The Houthis’ attacked Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, in September last year. So why did Saudi Arabia wait until March this year before sending its bombers in?

Iran has kept out of the conflict in Yemen so far, but the manifestly one-sided resolution passed by the U.N. Security Council and the immediate resignation of the U.N. special envoy for Yemen, Jamal Benomar, who had been struggling to bring about a non-sectarian resolution of the conflict in Yemen and been boycotted by the country’s president Abed Rabo Mansour Hadi for his pains, cannot have failed to raise misgivings in Tehran.

Iraqi President Haydar Abadi’s sharp criticism of the Saudi attack in Washington on the same day reflects his awareness of how these developments are darkening the prospect for Iran’s rehabilitation, and therefore Iraq’s future.

To stop this drift Obama needs to tell his people precisely how far, under Netanyahu’s leadership, Israel’s interests have diverged from those of the United States, and how single-mindedly Israel has used its special relationship with the United States to push it into actions that have imperilled its own security in the Middle East.

Instead of dwelling on how the nuclear treaty will make it practically impossible for Iran to clandestinely enrich uranium or produce plutonium, he needs to remind Americans of what Netanyahu has been carefully neglecting to mention: that a nuclear device is not a bomb, and that to convert it into one Iran will need not only to master the physics of bomb-making and reduce its weight to what a missile can carry, but conduct at least one test explosion to make sure the bomb works. That will make escaping detection pretty well impossible.

Finally, the White House needs to remind Americans that Iranians also know the price they will pay if they are caught trying to build a bomb after signing the agreement. Not only will this bring back all and more of the sanctions they are under,  but it will vindicate Netanyahu’s apocalyptic predictions and make a pre-emptive military strike virtually unavoidable.

Should a  military strike, whether deserved or undeserved,  destroy Iran’s economy, it will add tens of thousands of Shi’a Jihadis to the Sunni Jihadis already spawned in Libya, Somalia, Chechnya and  the other failed states and regions of the world. The security that Netanyahu claims it will bring will turn out to be a chimera.

Edited by Phil Harris

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

The European Commission is calling for SDGs to address poverty eradication and sustainable development together in three dimensions – economic, social and environmental. Photo credit: UNFPA Sudan

By Ramesh Jaura
BRUSSELS, May 5 2015 (IPS)

In the run-up to the international Conference on Financing for Development from Jul. 13 to 16 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the European Union has called for a “true paradigm shift” in global development cooperation.

The Addis Ababa conference will be followed by the U.N. post-2015 Summit in New York and the Climate Change conference in Paris in December. “These meetings will define our future and will set the level of ambition of the international community for the years and decades to come,” according to European Union Commissioner for International Cooperation and Development Neven Mimica.

The Addis Ababa conference on development financing in July and the Paris climate conference in December offer a “once in a lifetime” opportunity “to end poverty, achieve shared prosperity, transform economies, protect the environment, promote peace and ensure the respect of human rights” – Neven Mimica, European Union Commissioner for International Cooperation and Development
This, Mimica believes, offers a “once in a lifetime” opportunity “to end poverty, achieve shared prosperity, transform economies, protect the environment, promote peace and ensure the respect of human rights.”

The European Commission, which represents the interests of the 28-nation European Union, believes that the sustainable development goals (SDGs) to be agreed in New York in September should not only cover “traditional” development challenges such as poverty, health and education, but go much further and address poverty eradication and sustainable development together in three dimensions – economic, social and environmental.

The Commission is pleading for “moving towards a universal agenda”. This means that the goals and targets to be agreed in New York will apply to all countries, challenging them to achieve progress domestically, while contributing to the global effort. “Such a far-reaching agenda can only be delivered through a true global partnership,” said Mimica.

The E.U. Development Commissioner is backed by an eminent group of experts from Finland. France, Germany and Luxembourg, who have authored the fifth edition of the European Report on Development (ERD), which focuses on ‘Combining Finance and Policies to Implement a Transformative post-2015 Development Agenda’.

Mimica wants the agenda to serve to mobilise action by all countries and stakeholders at all levels: governments, private sector and civil society, all of which would need to play their part.

The key message of the ERD report, launched on May 4, is that policy and finance go together and that they are both crucial to implement a transformative post-2015 development agenda.

Based on existing evidence and specific country experiences, the report shows that finance alone is not enough – it seldom reaches the intended objectives, unless it is accompanied by complementary policies, the right combination of financing and enabling policies, says the report.

According to Mimica, “the findings and analysis contained in the report provide a most valuable research-based contribution to the debate, particularly in view of the Addis Conference on Financing for Development – but also beyond”.

“In this crucial year for international development cooperation, the 2015 European Report on Development can serve as a key point of reference, not just for the European Union, but for the international community at large,” Mimica said at the launching of the report.

The findings of the report are in line with three major guidelines which would drive the E.U. Commission’s action to implement the new development agenda:

• if it is not sustainable, it is not development
• if it is not resilient, it is not development
• if it is without women, it is not development

In many ways, the report complements and supports the work of the Commission in advocating a comprehensive approach to the means of implementation for the post-2015 development agenda. At the same time, it challenges the Commission to keep pushing our thinking forward, said Mimica.

The significance of the report is underlined by the fact that the European Union as a whole has consistently remained the biggest global aid donor, even in times of significant budgetary constraints.

According to latest figures, the European Union’s collective official development assistance (ODA) (by E.U. institutions and member states) has increased to Euro 58.2 billion (up by 2.4 percent from 2013) – growing for the second year in a row, and reaching its highest nominal level to date. Collective European Union ODA represented 0.42 percent of E.U. gross national income (GNI) in 2014.

A 0.7 percent ODA/GNI target was formally recognised in October 1970  when the U.N. General  Assembly adopted a resolution including the goal that “each economically advanced country will progressively increase its official  development  assistance  to  the  developing  countries  and  will  exert  its  best  efforts  to  reach  a minimum net amount of 0.7 percent of its gross national product at market prices by the middle of the decade.”

To date, the target has not been achieved but it has been repeatedly re-endorsed at the highest level at international aid and development conferences.

“We are committed to playing our full part in all aspects of the post-2015 agenda, including means of implementation,” Mimica stressed.

He added: “In our February Communication [on a Global Partnership for Poverty Eradication and Sustainable Development after 2015], the Commission was very clear. We proposed to the Member States a collective E.U. re-commitment to the 0.7 ODA/GNI target – and we hope indeed that there will be agreement amongst Member States on this ahead of Addis.”

Official development assistance will certainly remain important in a post-2015 context – in particular for the least developed countries (LDCs), according to Mimica.

“At the same time, we expect other partners – including other developed economies and emerging actors – to also contribute their fair share. The efforts of the European Union alone will not be enough.”

Aware that this is a rather controversial issue, he added: “To be able to speak of an ambitious outcome in Addis and New York, we will all need to raise our level of ambition. The EU is ready to engage with all partners to achieve this. We have been active and constructive in the negotiations so far, and we will continue to do so, taking a responsible, bridge-building approach.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

By Dr. Palitha Kohona
NEW YORK, Mar 26 2015 (IPS)

With Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s term of office tapering off by the end of 2016, there is increasing chatter in the corridors of the United Nations on his successor.

Amb. Palitha Kohona. Credit: U.N. Photo/Mark Garten

The interest in the top post at the U.N. has been heightened because of the issues that have emerged.

Among them: the importance of respecting the principle of regional rotation; the need to have a woman occupy the top job at the U.N. after 70 years of its existence; and the importance of more transparency in an organisation that devotes much energy to promote democracy in the world.

These are prominent among some of the conversation starters in the U.N. cocktail circuit, all against the background clamour to reform the Organisation.

The Charter itself says little on the appointment process. Article 97 stipulates that the General Assembly (GA) will appoint a secretary-general (SG) on the recommendation of the Security Council. As with much else at the U.N., the practice with regard to the appointment of the SG also has evolved in response to contemporary pressures. Resolutions 11/1 of 1946 and 54/246 of 1997 are important on this matter.

The Security Council will, in the first instance, seek consensus prior to recommending a candidate to the GA, although 9 votes in favour of a candidate in the Council would suffice.

If consensus is not feasible, the Council will vote on the candidates available. The practice of conducting straw polls among the members of the SC has become popular in recent times.While early aspirants to the post did not campaign under spurious pretexts, the need to approach a wide range of countries to seek their blessings is increasingly recognised.

To the disappointment of many members of the world body, the recommendation is adopted at a private meeting in accordance with Rule 48 of the Provisional Rules of Procedure.

The Permanent Five of the SC (P5) – namely Britain, the U.S. France Russia and China — exercises inordinate power over the selection process. Today the endorsement of the P5 is essential and consequently the veto acquires a particular significance in the SC recommendation.

In 1996, the significance of P5 endorsement was clearly highlighted. As the Council began its consideration of potential candidates, Boutros Boutros Ghali, the incumbent SG, received 14 endorsements in a straw poll, except the U.S.

Boutros Ghali had offended the U.S. with comments on the situation in the Middle East. A week later, a former senior U.N. official, Kofi Annan, a surprise candidate from the Secretariat, received the necessary endorsement of the SC with the backing of the P5.

Similarly, former Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim’s efforts to secure a third term in1981 were vetoed by the Chinese. It is now almost mandatory for the aspirants to the post of SG to undertake visits to the capitals of the P5 to seek their blessings and not say or do anything that would cause them alarm.

This was not always the case. When, in 1951,Trygve Lie of Norway was vetoed by the Soviet Union, as he sought his second term, the U.S. had him appointed through a clear majority of votes in the GA. Given the difficulties that Trygve Lie faced subsequently, especially in dealing with a hostile Soviet Union, it would be unlikely that such an approach would be adopted today.

Although there are suggestions that the SC should recommend more than one candidate, for the sake of transparency and to facilitate democratic choice, the GA has decided in Res 11 of 1946 that it would be desirable for the Council to proffer only one candidate.

Whether this sentiment continues to be shared by many in the GA today with its much wider membership is unclear. While a divisive vote in the GA is always possible, in recent times, the GA has tended to rubber stamp the recommendations of the SC.

While early aspirants to the post did not campaign under spurious pretexts, the need to approach a wide range of countries to seek their blessings is increasingly recognised. Visits to capitals could generate a groundswell of sympathy for a candidate which could influence members of the SC.

The present incumbent, a former Foreign Minister of South Korea, advancing his candidature the first time round, used his position as his country’s representative in the SC to visit as many capitals as possible.

The second time round, he was advised to seek the endorsement of the regional groups as he was mulling presenting his candidature, in particular, the Asia Pacific Group, his own regional group.

This was against the background of some whispered reservations about his performance in the first term, especially by certain countries of the Western Europe and Others Group (WEOG).

They were mostly concerns about his perceived lack of fluency in the working languages of the Organisation and the absence of firmness in dealing with difficult issues.

Still, the Asia Pacific Group endorsed him unequivocally, setting in motion a tide of endorsements from the other regional groups. He announced his candidature immediately following his meeting with the Asia Pacific Group.

The WEOGs provided the first two SGs. An assertive developing world demanded the next. U Thant of Burma (now Myanmar) was appointed, despite initial opposition from France.

The Eastern European Group has asserted a claim to the post after Ban because the group has never had this position before and because there are many suitable candidates from the region.

Res 51/241 supports their position. Among the possible Eastern European aspirants are the former U.N. Under-Secretary-General and the Former President of Slovenia, Danilo Turk, the Executive DIrector of UNESCO, Irena Bukova of Bulgaria, EC Commissioner, Kristalina Georgieva of Bulgaria, the Lithuanian President, Dalia Grybauskaite, the vice Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Monte Negro, Igor Luksic, and the popular Permanent Representative of Romania, Simona Miculescu.

The WEOGs have occupied the post three times – the Asia Pacific twice, Africa twice and Latin America and the Caribbean once. Candidates from the P5s are not considered for the post. Should Eastern Europe come up with a suitable candidate, they are likely to get the post this time.

Given the perceived lack of clarity with regard to the Eastern European candidature, others have begun to test the water.

Among them are, Kevin Rudd, the former Prime Minister of Australia; Helen Clerk, the Administrator of the UNDP and former Prime Minister of New Zealand; Antonio Guterres, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and former Prime Minister of Portugal; and Michelle Bachelet, former Executive Director of UN Women and current president of Chile.

It is noteworthy that the Non-Aligned Movement, the largest single political grouping of developing nations, has strongly backed the appointment of a woman to succeed Ban.

The general feeling among Member States is that the time for a woman SG has arrived. There does not seem to be a shortage of exceptionally qualified women in the field.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

By Mandeep S.Tiwana
JOHANNESBURG, Mar 23 2015 (IPS)

For those of us interested in a vibrant civil society, it seems to be best of times and the worst of times.

In recent months, there has been great progress in recognising the importance of civil society in shaping the so-called ‘post-2015’ agenda and an explicit recognition of the important role that civil society will play in delivering sustainable development. However, in many countries around the world, the actual conditions in which civil society operates are getting worse not better.

As we come closer to a new global agreement on sustainable development goals (SDGs), we need to push for an agreement – backed by robust indicators – that will make a tangible difference in protecting civic freedoms.

Mandeep S. Tiwana

Indeed, a perceptible rise in bureaucratic harassment and raids on NGO offices, violent dispersal of citizen demonstrations, attacks on and illicit surveillance of activists, combined with the application of draconian laws to silence dissent and restrict funding, has many civil society observers worried about shrinking space for the sector.

Over the course of last year, CIVICUS, the global alliance for citizen participation, monitored severe threats to civic freedoms in roughly half of the globe’s 193 countries. Amnesty International’s Annual Report for 2014/2015 calls it “a devastating year” for those seeking to stand up for human rights. Front Line Defenders, which works to protect human rights defenders at risk, reports the killing or death in detention of over 130 human rights defenders in the first ten months of 2014 alone.

All of this is happening while the United Nations is making unprecedented efforts to ensure greater civil society participation in the post-2015 global development framework.

While the next generation of sustainable development goals, their associated targets and indicators will be decided by world leaders at their Sep. 25-27 summit in New York this year, civil society’s role in grounding the framework in people’s aspirations and holding duty bearers to account is crucial.“Assurances for a civil society enabling environment and respect for the freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly in the post-2015 framework are integral to greater public involvement and accountability in development”

In light of recent trends which point to shrinkage of civil society space, in both democracies and non-democracies, there is naturally a high level of anxiety whether guarantees on civic freedoms and civil society participation will be included in the final framework. Indeed, a major criticism of the current Millennium Development Goal (MDG) framework is that it has failed to recognise and thereby institutionalise the role of active citizens and civil society organisations in development.

Assurances for a civil society enabling environment and respect for the freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly in the post-2015 framework are integral to greater public involvement and accountability in development.

So far, some progress has been made but the gains remain shaky because many governments which will be involved in adopting the final framework in September are themselves complicit in serious violations of civic freedoms. These include some influential states such as China, Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia and Turkey whose developmental models are predicated on top-down governance with scant role for independent civil society.

Positively, the U.N. Secretary General’s Synthesis Report on the Post-2015 Agenda, released in December last year, calls for the creation of an “enabling environment under the rule of law for the free, active and meaningful engagement of civil society and advocates reflecting the voices of women, minorities, LGBT groups, indigenous peoples, youth, adolescents and older persons.”

Notably, participatory democracy – without which civic freedoms cannot meaningfully exist – has been described as both an enabler and outcome of development.

From the perspective of civic freedoms and civil society participation, the U.N. Secretary General’s report has done well to elaborate on the proposal submitted to the U.N. General Assembly by the Open Working on Sustainable Development Goals (OWG) in July 2014.

Comprising 30 representatives nominated by U.N. member states from all the regions of the world, the OWG recommended 17 goals and 169 corresponding targets which are the basis of intergovernmental negotiations on the SDGs this year.

Two goals are particularly relevant from the standpoint of civil society’s ability to freely operate and monitor progress on the framework.  These are proposed Goal 16 (“promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels”) and proposed Goal 17 (“strengthen the means of implementation and revitalise the global partnership for development”). 

The proposed goals are further sub-divided into targets. For instance, targets under Goal 16 include “responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision making at all levels” and “public access to information and protect fundamental freedoms, in accordance with national legislation and international agreements.” A key target under Goal 17 is to “encourage and promote effective public, public-private, and civil society partnerships, building on the experience and resourcing strategies of partnerships.”

Progress on the proposed targets will be measured by indicators currently being developed by various U.N. bodies, including the U.N. Statistics Division. Ultimately, it will be the indicators that will anchor the post-2105 agenda because gains will be gauged through their prism. It is therefore crucial that the United Nations is able to identify suitable tools to measure civic space and civil society participation.

Although, the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) has produced a report titled ‘Accountability through Civic Participation in the Post-2015 Development Agenda’, much more needs to be done to put in place relevant indicators that are linked to the targets identified by the OWG.

For instance, in relation to proposed Target 16.10 with its focus on “fundamental freedoms”, it would be valuable to evaluate whether both legislation and practice protect civic space, in particular the freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly.  Similarly, under proposed Target 17.17 with its focus on encouraging and promoting civil society partnerships, it will be vital to measure the existence of enabling conditions such as mandated requirements for civil society involvement in official policy making processes at the national level.

Currently, there are a number of initiatives that measure civic space and civil society participation. Some of these, such as the World Press Freedom Index, the Freedom in the World survey and the Enabling Environment Index, are led by civil society organisations, while others such as the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation are being developed by multi-stakeholder initiatives.

With post-2015 negotiations entering the final phase, it is vital that political negotiators and technical experts are convinced that adoption of the above and associated methodologies will lead to better service delivery, citizen monitoring and accountability.

With the attention on the post-2015 agenda now focused on measurement, civil society advocates have their work cut out to also engage and influence the statisticians. Ambitious goals and targets will count for nothing if not backed by relevant indicators. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr
WHITE PLAINS, New York, Dec 30 2014 (IPS)

Earlier this month, President Barack Obama announced the restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba after more than five decades of a misguided policy which my uncle, John F. Kennedy, and my father, Robert F. Kennedy, had been responsible for enforcing after the U.S. embargo against the country was first implemented in October 1960 by the Eisenhower administration.

The move has raised hopes in many quarters – not only in the United States but around the world – that the embargo itself is now destined to disappear.

Robert F Kennedy Jr

This does not detract from the fact that Cuba is still a dictatorship. The Cuban government restricts basic freedoms like the freedoms of speech and assembly, and it owns the media.

Elections, as in most old-school Communist countries, offer limited options and, during periodic crackdowns, the Cuban government fills Cuban jails with political prisoners.

However, there are real tyrants in the world with whom the United States has become a close ally and many governments with much worse human rights records than Cuba – Azerbaijan, for example, whose president Ilham Aliyev boils his opponents in oil, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, China, Bahrain, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and many others where torture, enforced disappearances, religious intolerance, suppression of speech and assembly, mediaeval oppression of women, sham elections and non-judicial executions are all government practices.

Despite its poverty, Cuba has managed some impressive accomplishments. Cuba’s government boasts the highest literacy rates for its population of any nation in the hemisphere. Cuba claims its citizens enjoy universal access to health care and more doctors per capita than any other nation in the Americas. Cuba’s doctors, reportedly, have high quality medical training.“It seems stupid to pursue a U.S. foreign policy by repeating a strategy that has proved a monumental failure for six decades. The definition of insanity is repeating the same action over and over, and expecting different results. In this sense, the [Cuba] embargo is insane”

Unlike other Caribbean islands where poverty means starvation, all Cubans receive a monthly food ration book that provides for their basic necessities.

Even Cuban government officials admit that the economy is smothered by the inefficiencies of Marxism, although they also argue that the principal cause of the island’s economic woes is the strangling impact of the 60-year-old trade embargo – and it is clear to everyone that the embargo first implemented during the Eisenhower administration in October 1960 unfairly punishes ordinary Cubans.

The embargo impedes economic development by making virtually every commodity and every species of equipment both astronomically expensive and difficult to obtain.

Worst of all, instead of punishing the regime for its human rights restrictions, the embargo has fortified the dictatorship by justifying oppression. It provides every Cuban with visible evidence of the bogeyman that every dictator requires – an outside enemy to justify an authoritarian national security state.

The embargo has also given Cuban leaders a plausible monster on which to blame Cuba’s poverty by lending credence to their argument that the United States, not Marxism, has caused the island’s economic distress.

The embargo has almost certainly helped keep the Castro brothers [Fidel and Raul] in power for the last five decades.

It has justified the Cuban government’s oppressive measures against political dissent in the same way that U.S. national security concerns have been used by some U.S. politicians to justify incursions against our bill of rights, including the constitutional rights to jury trial, habeas corpus, effective counsel and freedom from unwarranted search and seizure, eavesdropping, cruel and unusual punishment, torturing of prisoners, extraordinary renditions and the freedom to travel, to name just a few.

It is almost beyond irony that the very same politicians who argued that we should punish Castro for curtailing human rights and mistreating prisoners in Cuban jails elsewhere contend that the United States is justified in mistreating our own prisoners in Cuban jails.

Imagine a U.S. president faced, as Castro was, with over 400 assassination attempts, thousands of episodes of foreign-sponsored sabotage directed at our nation’s people, factories and bridges, a foreign-sponsored invasion and fifty years of economic warfare that has effectively deprived our citizens of basic necessities and strangled our economy.

The Cuban leadership has pointed to the embargo with abundant justification as the reason for economic deprivation in Cuba.

The embargo allows the regime to portray the United States as a bully and itself as the personification of courage, standing up to threats, intimidation and economic warfare by history’s greatest military superpower.

It perpetually reminds the proud Cuban people that our powerful nation, which has staged invasions of their island and plotted for decades to assassinate their leaders and sabotaged their industry, continues an aggressive campaign to ruin their economy.

Perhaps the best argument for lifting the embargo is that it does not work. Our 60-plus year embargo against Cuba is the longest in history and yet the Castro regime has remained in power during its entire duration.

Instead of lifting the embargo, different U.S. administrations, including the Kennedy administration, have strengthened it without result. It seems silly to pursue a U.S. foreign policy by repeating a strategy that has proved a monumental failure for six decades. The definition of insanity is repeating the same action over and over expecting different results. In this sense, the embargo is insane.

The embargo clearly discredits U.S. foreign policy, not only across Latin America, but also with Europe and other regions.

For more than 20 years, the U.N. General Assembly has called for lifting the embargo. Last year the vote was 188 in favour and two against (the United States and Israel). The Inter American Commission on Human Rights (the main human rights bodies of the Americas) has also called for lifting the embargo and the African Union likewise.

One reason that it diminishes our global prestige and moral authority is that the entire embargo enterprise only emphasises our distorted relationship with Cuba. That relationship is historically freighted with powerful ironies that make the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world.

Most recently, while we fault Cuba for jailing and mistreating political prisoners, we have simultaneously been subjecting prisoners, many of them innocent by the Pentagon’s own admission, to torture – including waterboarding and illegal detention and imprisonment without trial in Cuban prison cells in Guantanamo Bay.

While we blame Cuba for not allowing its citizens to travel freely to the United States, we restrict our own citizens from traveling freely to Cuba. In that sense, the embargo seems particularly anti-American. Why does my passport say that I can’t visit Cuba? Why can’t I go where I want to go?

I have been a fortunate American. I have been able to visit Cuba and that was a wonderful education because it gave me the opportunity to see Communism with all its warts and faults up close. Why doesn’t our government trust Americans to see for themselves the ravages of dictatorship?

Had President Kennedy survived to a second administration, the embargo would have been lifted half a century ago.

President Kennedy told Castro, through intermediaries, that the United States would end the embargo when Cuba stopped exporting violent revolutionists to Latin America’s Alliance for Progress nations – a policy that mainly ended with Che Guevara’s death in 1967 and when Castro stopped allowing the Soviets to use the island as a base for the expansion of Soviet power in the hemisphere.

Well, the Soviets have been gone since 1991 – more than 20 years ago – but the U.S.-led embargo continues to choke Cuba’s economy. If the objective of our foreign policy in Cuba is to promote freedom for its subdued citizens, we should be opening ourselves up to them, not shutting them out.

We have so much to learn from Cuba – from its successes in some areas and failures in others.

As I walked through the streets of Havana, Model-Ts chugged by, Che’s soaring effigy hung in wrought iron above the street, and a bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln stood in a garden on a tree-lined avenue.

I could feel the weight of sixty years of Cuban history, a history so deeply intertwined with that of my own country. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Christine Ahn and Suzy Kim
HONOLULU, Dec 2 2014 (IPS)

On Nov. 18, a committee of the United Nations General Assembly voted 111 to 19, with 55 abstentions, in favour of drafting a non-binding resolution referring North Korea to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Christine Ahn

While there is overwhelming evidence that economic and political conditions in North Korea must improve, missing from debates in U.N. corridors is the fact that the unresolved Korean War (1950-1953) underlies North Korea’s human rights crisis."While there is overwhelming evidence that economic and political conditions in North Korea must improve, missing from debates in U.N. corridors is the fact that the unresolved Korean War (1950-1953) underlies North Korea's human rights crisis"

After claiming up to four million lives with at least one member of every family in North Korea killed by the war, the Korean War was halted by an armistice agreement signed by North Korea, China and the United States representing the United Nations Command.

Suzy Kim

As James Laney, U.S. Ambassador to South Korea during the 1990s explains, “one of the things that have bedevilled all talks until now is the unresolved status of the Korean War” and he prescribes the “establishment of a peace treaty to replace the truce.”

What does the past have to do with the present state of human rights in North Korea?

The continued state of war affects the human rights of North Korean people today in at least two ways. Domestically, the North Korean government prioritises military defence and national security over human security and political freedoms. Internationally, North Koreans suffer due to political isolation and economic sanctions.

The fact that the Korean War ended with a temporary ceasefire rather than a permanent peace treaty gives the North Korean government justification – whether we like it or not – to invest heavily in the country’s militarisation.

According to the South Korean government’s Institute of Defense Analyses, North Korea invests approximately 8.7 billion dollars – or one-third of its GDP – on defence.

Pyongyang even acknowledged last year how the un-ended war has forced it “to divert large human and material resources to bolstering up the armed forces though they should have been directed to the economic development and improvement of people’s living standards.”

Since military intervention is not an option, the Barack Obama administration has used sanctions to pressure North Korea to denuclearise. Instead, North Korea has since conducted three nuclear tests, calling sanctions “an act of war”.

That is because sanctions have had deleterious effects on the day-to-day lives of ordinary North Korean people. “In almost any case when there are sanctions against an entire people, the people suffer the most and the leaders suffer least,” said former U.S. President Jimmy Carter on his last visit to North Korea.

International sanctions have made it extremely difficult for North Koreans to access basic necessities, such as food, seeds, medicine and technology. Felix Abt, a Swiss entrepreneur who has conducted business in North Korea for over a decade says that it is “the most heavily sanctioned nation in the world, and no other people have had to deal with the massive quarantines that Western and Asian powers have enclosed around its economy.” 

Whether in Pyongyang, Seoul or Washington, the threat of war or terrorism has been used to justify government repression and overreach, such as warrantless surveillance, imprisonment and torture (“enhanced interrogation techniques”) in the name of preserving national security.

In South Korea, one of the liberal opposition parties, the Unified Progressive Party, is currently on trial in the Constitutional Court on charges made by the Park Geun-hye government that its members conspired with North Korea to overthrow the South Korean government.

Amnesty International says that this case “has seriously damaged the human rights improvement of South Korean society which has struggled and fought for freedom of thoughts and conscience and freedom of expression.”

In the coming days, the U.N. General Assembly will vote on whether the U.N. Security Council should refer North Korea to the ICC, although it is likely to be vetoed by China and Russia. The United Nations vote, while lofty in principle, actually serves to further isolate Pyongyang, which will likely retreat even further behind its iron curtain.

“We’ve said from day one that if North Korea wants to rejoin the community of nations, it knows how to do it,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has said, referring to the precondition of denuclearisation for talks.

Instead of relying on the failed Washington policy of “strategic patience” it is time for a bold move that will truly bring North Korea into the community of nations, leaving no excuse to delay addressing human rights – sign a peace treaty to end the state of war. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Roger Hamilton-Martin
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 10 2014 (IPS)

Ambassador Nassir Abdulaziz al-Nasser currently heads the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations. Between 2011-2012 he was president of the General Assembly, setting the agenda for debate in the assembly during the Arab Spring.

His new book, “A year at the helm of the General Assembly” has just been published by NYU Press.You don’t want to enlarge the Security Council for the sake of representation only. No, (you must enlarge) for the commitment, the contribution.

IPS correspondent Roger Hamilton-Martin interviewed the ambassador on issues central to the book– mediation and U.N. reform. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: How can we reform the General Assembly to ensure that practical steps are taken to improve implementation of resolutions by member states?

A: I look at the problem from (the perspective of) the mandate of the president of the General Assembly. One year. How can you achieve good results in one year? I was lucky because I was elected in February 2011 and I was still the ambassador of Qatar to the U.N., so it gave me enough time to prepare and organise.

I was ready from June, you know. June 2011. I took over in September. For someone who doesn’t know the system very well, he doesn’t know many people in the U.N… by the time he takes over, half of the year is gone. By the time he wants to discuss and reach agreement or create consensus, the other half is gone.

We need at least two years for the president. At least, if not more. One of the former PGAs tried to, with many countries, to try to come up with an agreement and a draft resolution to amend the charter. They faced great difficulties.

Q: On the Security Council, some say that certain countries are less relevant to global security currently than they were – Britain and France, for example. Should these countries stay as permanent members?

A: It is not up to me to say, “This country is better than that country.” This is a negotiation that must be had amongst the P5. We are looking at this to increase the permanent members not to decrease the current (P5) – they will be there.

We need more, you see many emerging powers around the world and they can also contribute to peace and security. You don’t need them for prestige; you need them for their involvement, for their support, for their role in the regions.

That’s where I am talking about how to reform, not to change the structure. We need a very effective council. How to achieve that? You have to look at what was the problem in the last 60, 70 years and how you can change based on that. I served there, I represented Qatar. If you don’t have consensus, and solidarity on issues, it’s a big problem.

The agreement among the 15 is very important. First among the P5, and then among the 15. So you don’t want to enlarge the council for the sake of representation only. No, (you must enlarge) for the commitment, the contribution.

Q: Is there a reluctance to amend the charter?

A: The P5 will not allow it. The United Nations always been accused by many people, NGOs, governments, but they don’t know, it’s not the fault of the U.N.

The U.N. is a state-driven – if there is consensus, there is agreement, and there is achievement. If there is no achievement, there is nothing. I want here to add a commend to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon – he in his two terms did a lot, but still needs the support of member states.

If there is support you will see a different U.N.  I’m sure in the constitutions of many countries from time to time there is an amendment to deal with issues that weren’t there 100 or 200 years ago. It’s very essential and very important.

Q: In the history of the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA), there have only been three female presidents. What could be done to heighten participation?

A: We would love to see UNGA female presidents. Women who have assumed senior positions at the U.N. in general as under secretary-generals or assistant secretary generals have done remarkable jobs. I am sure they will do great as presidents of the General Assembly as well.

We need to encourage member states who nominate their candidates for this top position to support women candidates.  I am all for women leadership and gender balance.

Q: With the current situation in Iraq and Syria, what role does mediation have to play when it comes to ISIS? Is there a place for sitting down at the table with a militant organisation?

A: Today we always accuse governments that they are not doing enough. But politics and political decisions are not enough.  There is a responsibility on the religious leaders, there is responsibility on civil society, there is a responsibility on academia and university, there is responsibility even on the private sector.

So I think we should work together – religious leaders today can get involved in what’s going on with ISIS. You know young people – lack of education, negative environment, they an easy target for those people (ISIS).

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, a member of civil society from the Marshall Islands, received a standing ovation at the opening of the U.N. Climate Summit 2014 for her poem addressed to her daughter. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Joel Jaeger
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 24 2014 (IPS)

Speaking to more than 120 heads of state at the U.N. Climate Summit, actor and newly appointed U.N. Messenger of Peace Leonardo DiCaprio made clear the long-ranging impact of the attendees’ decisions.

“You will make history,” he said, “or you will be vilified by it.”All eyes were on China and the United States, respectively the number one and number two carbon emitting countries in the world.

Tuesday’s climate summit was not a part of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiation framework. Instead, it was a special event convened by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to catalyse public opinion and increase political will for a binding climate agreement to be negotiated in Paris at the end of 2015.

“This mixture of governmental, business, cities, states [and] civil society engagement is certainly unprecedented and it offers a chance to open the climate change discussion at a heads of state level as never before,” said Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate and energy programme at the World Resources Institute (WRI), in a statement before the summit.

The secretary-general opened the summit by exhorting leaders to make substantial commitments to mitigate climate change.

“Climate change is the defining issue of our age,” he said. “We must work together to mobilise markets” and “commit to a meaningful, universal climate agreement in Paris in 2015.”

In three simultaneous sessions, world leaders announced national action and ambition plans to combat climate change. These announcements included pledges to cut emissions, donate money to the Green Climate Fund, halt deforestation and undertake efforts to put a price on carbon.

Representatives from small island states lamented that their countries would be underwater in only a few decades, while African leaders pointed out the growing number of climate refugees.

All eyes were on China and the United States, respectively the number one and number two carbon emitting countries in the world.

U.S. President Barack Obama announced that all future U.S. investments in international development would consider climate resiliency as an important factor. He also said that the U.S. would meet its target of reducing carbon emissions in the range of 17 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2020.

“We recognise our role in creating this problem. We embrace our responsibility to combat it,” Obama said. “We will do our part and we will help developing nations to do theirs.”

“But we can only succeed in combating climate change if we are joined in this effort by every nation, developed and developing alike. Nobody gets a pass.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping did not attend the climate summit, but instead sent Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli.

While some were disappointed at Xi’s absence, the fact that such a high-ranking Chinese official would speak of the necessity of climate change mitigation was cause for optimism.

In a reaction statement, WRI’s Jennifer Morgan said that “China’s remarks at the Climate Summit go further than ever before. Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli’s announcement to strive to peak emissions ‘as early as possible’ is a welcome signal for the cooperative action we need for the Paris Agreement.”

China alone accounts for one quarter of worldwide carbon emissions annually.

Narendra Modi, newly elected prime minister of India, also declined to attend the climate summit. India is the world’s third largest emitter of carbon.

Midway through the day, the secretary-general was insistent that real progress was being made.

“This summit is not about talk,” he said. “The climate summit is producing actions that make a difference.”

One of the most concrete things that nations can do to combat climate change is to make pledges to the Green Climate Fund.

The Green Climate Fund is a UNFCCC mechanism designed to transfer money from developed countries to developing countries, to build climate resilience.

During the summit French President François Hollande pledged one billion dollars to the Climate Fund over the next few years. Several other countries, including Norway and Switzerland, also promised to contribute smaller amounts. Germany pledged one billion dollars to the fund several months ago.

Still, these efforts do not nearly close the climate resilience gap between rich and poor states.

Bolivian President Evo Morales voiced a common frustration in his statement on behalf of the G77 and China, a group of developing countries.

“Developing countries continue to suffer the most from the adverse impacts of climate change… even though they are historically the least responsible for climate change,” he said.

Morales criticised developed countries for failing to uphold their commitments, and said that developing countries would only be able to fulfil their commitments to reducing carbon without substantial financial assistance from developed countries.

It’s easy “to get caught in the zero-sum game” when talking about steps to mitigate climate change, David Waskow, head of WRI’s International Climate Initiative, told IPS. However, “one of the things that was heard frequently today from the podium was the recognition that climate action and economic growth and development can go hand in hand.”

Historical responsibility is a concern, he said, but it should not stop poor countries from recognising that “there are paths forward on climate action that can in fact be beneficial for development.”

Waskow pointed out that renewable energy will soon be just as cheap as fossil fuels in many countries, and could provide significant development benefits in rural areas far from the main electricity grid.

In addition to the climate summit’s main speeches, numerous side events took place, including thematic debates on the economic case for action and on climate science. A special session entitled “Voices from the Climate Front Lines” highlighted the experiences of children, youth, women and indigenous peoples in building resilience to climate change.

Meanwhile, popular support for action against climate change is gaining energy.

Around 100 climate-related events are taking place in New York between Sep. 22 and 28 as part of the Climate Week NYC campaign.

Two days before the summit, around 400,000 climate supporters joined the People’s Climate March in New York, several times the expected number.

Buses carried in marchers from across the United States. Solidarity marches and events occurred in 166 countries.

Ban, Leonardo DiCaprio, climate change activist and ex-U.S. President Al Gore and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio all participated in New York’s march.

Despite the strong turnout, many climate supporters fear that the hype surrounding the summit and the 2015 Paris conference will amount to nothing more than it did in 2009, when hopes of a climate agreement in Copenhagen fizzled.

When asked whether enough had changed since 2009 to result in a successful climate treaty, Brandon Wu, senior policy analyst at ActionAid USA, told IPS “I think there’s been enough [change] to get something through. I don’t think there’s been enough to get through something as ambitious as we need.”

For the 2015 Paris agreement to succeed, negotiators will need a “clear, focused and strong draft agreement” by the end of the U.N.’s climate change conference (COP20) in Lima this December, said COP20 president and Peruvian environmental minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal in a press call.

Major economies will need to come forward by March 2015 with their proposed contributions to the Paris framework.

In his remarks at the climate summit, Al Gore put forward his take on what was necessary for a successful climate treaty.

“All we need is political will, but political will is a renewable resource.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

A wide view of the General Assembly Hall as Sam Kahamba Kutesa (shown on screens), President of the sixty-ninth session of the Assembly, addresses the first plenary meeting of the session on Sep. 16, 2014. Credit: UN Photo/Amanda Voisard

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 22 2014 (IPS)

As the 69th session of the General Assembly took off with the usual political pageantry, the United Nations will be hosting as many as seven “high-level meetings”, “summits” and “special sessions” compressed into a single week – the largest number in living memory.

The agenda includes a world conference on indigenous peoples; a special session on the 20th anniversary of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development; a climate summit; and a Security Council meeting of world leaders on counter-terrorism presided over by U.S. President Barack Obama."We will see this on full display in the coming days: gatherings that are symptomatic but that make little progress, gatherings that may drive forward the very policies that are fueling the crisis." -- James Paul

Additionally, there will be a summit meeting on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa; a high-level event on the U.N.’s Global Education First Initiative’s (GEFI); and a summit meeting of business leaders sponsored by the U.N.’s Global Compact.

All of this in a tightly-packed five-day political extravaganza ending Friday, which also includes an address by U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama at the GEFI meeting.

At a press conference last week, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described the upcoming events in superlatives.

“This is going to be one of the largest, biggest gatherings of world leaders, particularly when it comes to climate change,” he said.

Still, neither the General Assembly nor the Security Council has seen fit to summon a special session or a summit meeting of world leaders on the widespread crises that have resulted in hundreds of thousands killed and millions reduced to the status of refugees: in Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Perhaps the easy way out was to focus merely on counter-terrorism instead of directly engaging Iraq or Syria.

The primary reason for avoiding these crises is the sharp division of opinion among the 193 member states in the General Assembly and a virtual Cold War confrontation between veto-wielding Russia and the United States in the 15-member Security Council, with China supporting the Russians.

James Paul, a former founding executive director of the New York based Global Policy Forum, told IPS: “The U.N.’s unprecedented number of global policy events in the coming days reflects the parlous state of the planet and the fear among those at the top that things are coming apart.”

He said terrorism, the climate crisis, Ebola outbreak, population pushing towards nine billion – these are signs the globalised society once so proudly announced is coming unstuck.

“Lurking in the background are other dangers: the persistent economic crisis, the problems of governability, and the rising tide of migration that are destabilising political regimes everywhere,” said Paul, who has been monitoring and writing extensively on the politics and policy-making at the United Nations since 1993.

Despite some star-studded attendees at the General Assembly sessions this year, there are a couple of high-profile world leaders who will be conspicuous by their absence.

Those skipping the sessions include Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who plans to address the General Assembly, is skipping the Climate Summit.

Asked about the non-starters, the secretary-general said: “But, in any event, we have other means of communications, ways and means of having their leadership demonstrated in the United Nations.”

And so it’s extremely difficult to have at one day at one time at one place 120 heads of state in government, he said, in an attempt to justify the absentee leaders.

“In that case,” said a Wall Street Journal editorial rather sarcastically, “why not do a conference call?” of all world leaders.

The editorial also pointed out “the Chinese economy has been the number one global producer of carbon dioxide since 2008, but President Xi Jinping won’t be gracing the U.N. with his presence.”

Paul told IPS since the problems facing the international community are global in scope, everyone realises they must be addressed globally, hence the turn towards the United Nations.

“But the powerful countries are uncomfortable with the U.N. even as they seek to impose their own global solutions,” he said.

So there is the paradox of global crises and global conversations, without effective global governance. Democracy is definitely off the table, said Paul, whose honours include the World Hunger Media Award and a “Peacemaker” award by Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

“We will see this on full display in the coming days: gatherings that are symptomatic but that make little progress, gatherings that may drive forward the very policies that are fueling the crisis,” he said.

Above all, he said, the business leaders of the Global Compact, will be gathering to “bluewash” their companies and to declare their commitment to a better world while promoting a neoliberal society of weak governance and the invisible hand.

“They will be waltzing in dreamland. Please pour another champagne,” Paul declared.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

By Julitta Onabanjo, Benoit Kalasa, and Mohamed Abdel-Ahad
JOHANNESBURG, Sep 21 2014 (IPS)

Different issues will be competing for the attention of different African leaders attending the 69th United Nations General Assembly Special Session on International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) Beyond 2014 in New York on Sep 22.

But the central question for Africa’s development today is this: How do we harness the dividend from the continent’s current youthful population?

Solving this issue has never been more fundamental to Africa’s development than it is today.

For decades many, African countries have come up with a variety of ‘development’ plans. But often missing in these documents is how best to harness the potential of the youthful population for the transformation of the continent.

Therefore, strategic investment to harness the potential of the youth population can no longer wait.“African governments must know that efforts to create a demographic dividend are likely to fail as long as vast portions of young females are denied their rights, including their right to education, health and civil participation, and their reproductive rights”

The groundswell for change

Africa is undergoing important demographic changes, which provide immense economic opportunities. Currently, there are 251 million adolescents aged 10-19 years in Africa compared with 1.2 billion worldwide, which means that around one in five adolescents in the world comes from Africa.

Africa’s working age population is growing and increasing the continent’s productive potential. If mortality continues to decline and fertility declines rapidly, the current high child dependency burden will reduce drastically. The result of such change is an opportunity for the active and employed youth to invest more.  With declining death rates, the working age population in Africa will increase from about 54 percent of the population in 2010 to a peak of about 64 percent in 2090.

This increase in the working age population will also create a window of opportunity  that, if properly harnessed, should translate into higher economic growth for Africa, yielding what is now termed a ‘demographic dividend’ – or accelerated economic growth spurred by a change in the age structure of the population.

Reaping the demographic dividend requires investments in job creation, health including sexual and reproductive health and family planning, education and skill and development, which would lead to increasing per capita income.

Due to low dependency ratio, individuals and families will be able to make savings, which translate into investment and boost economic growth. This is how East Asian countries (Asian Tigers) were able to capitalise on their demographic window during the period 1965 and 1990.

The impact of such a demographic transition on economic growth is no longer questionable – it is simply a fact.

But this transformation requires that appropriate policies, strategies, programs and projects are in place to ensure that a demographic dividend can be reaped from the youth bulge.

Seizing the moment

Without concerted action, many African countries could instead face a backlash from the growing numbers of disgruntled and unemployed youth that will emerge.

In the worst-case scenario, such a demographic transition could translate into an army of unemployed youth and significantly increase social risks and tensions.

To seize the opportunity, African states will need to focus their investments in a number of critical areas. A priority will be the education and training of their youth.

African governments must know that efforts to create a demographic dividend are likely to fail as long as vast portions of young females are denied their rights, including their right to education, health and civil participation, and their reproductive rights.

If these efforts are to succeed, this will demand addressing gender disparities between today’s boys and girls especially, but more specifically, addressing the vulnerabilities of the adolescent girl.

Beyond rhetoric

As we move toward the post-2015 development agenda, unleashing the potential and power of Africa’s youth should be a critical component of the continent’s developmental strategies, as reflected in the Addis Ababa Declaration on Population and Development – the regional outcome of ICPD beyond 2014 – and the Common African Position on the post-2015 development agenda.

This can no longer be reduced to election or political polemics. It requires urgent action.

Young people are central to the realisation of the demographic dividend. It is therefore important to protect and fulfil the rights of adolescents and youth to accurate information, comprehensive sexuality education, and health services for sexual and reproductive well-being and lifelong health, to ensure a productive and competitive labour force.

Africa cannot afford to squander the potential gains of the 21st Century offered by such an important demographic asset:  its youthful population.

Edited by Ronald Joshua

Excerpt:

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (centre, facing audience) greets staff and guests during his Sep. 15 visit to the newly renovated General Assembly Hall at U.N. Headquarters in New York. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 18 2014 (IPS)

When world political leaders arrive next week for the annual ritual of addressing the United Nations, they will be speaking inside a newly renovated General Assembly hall – part of a hefty 2.1-billion-dollar, seven-year refurbishing project – with an extended seating capacity for 204 member states, 11 more than the current 193.

In the next decade, the United Nations may be anticipating a rash of new member states, primarily breakaway nations triggered partly by separatist movements, seeking to join the world body.If political fantasies become realities, the unlikely lineup of new U.N. member states may include Catalonia, Kosovo, Kurdistan, Quebec, Kashmir, Chechnya, Abkhazia, Palestine, and possibly a Sunni Iraq and a Shia Iraq.

If political fantasies become realities, the unlikely lineup may include Catalonia, Kosovo, Kurdistan, Quebec, Kashmir, Chechnya, Abkhazia, Palestine, and possibly a Sunni Iraq and a Shia Iraq.

As one Middle Eastern diplomat sarcastically speculated, “I was wondering whether one of those new seats is meant for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)” (which the United States considers a terrorist group).

As in previous years, the drill next week will be the same: long-winded speeches, hundreds of bilateral meetings between world leaders (without even crossing the street) and a tight security around the U.N. perimeter.

And this year, the visiting political leaders – at last count, over 150 heads of state or heads of government – will be taking the podium at a time when the world is facing a slew of political and military crises, including in Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia.

Ian Williams, a longstanding U.N. correspondent and an associate professor at Bard College, told IPS the completion of renovations to the General Assembly hall shows some degree of foresight, with a dozen or so spare places available for new delegations.

“With the pace of Balkanisation worldwide, however, that might not be enough,” he said, with tongue firmly in cheek.

Kosovo, Kurdistan, and not to mention the various Putinistans springing up on the fringes of Russia, could soon fill those seats, said Williams, who is working with artist Christian Clark on a new edition of ‘The U.N. For Beginners’ for the 70th anniversary of the world body next year.

He pointed out there is also increasing political Balkanisation of the blocs in the United Nations.

“In days of the old Cold War, there was a certain discipline. All the East Bloc speeches were drearily similar. Now, countries pay little heed to instructions from self-appointed superpowers and are more eager,” said Williams.

Asked if the General Assembly sessions have any impact at all on world events, Samir Sanbar, a former U.N. assistant secretary-general and head of the Department of Public Information, told IPS, “With all due respect to all visiting heads of state, I am not certain the term ‘leaders’ would apply anymore.”

That may partially explain the atmosphere of widespread turmoil the world over, he added.

“So many presidential appearances yet so little positive impact,” said Sanbar, who served under five different secretaries-general.

Until recently, he pointed out, there were endless bilateral meetings between presidents and prime ministers on the sidelines of the General Assembly session. The general debates during the sessions were substantive, and they constituted a backbone for eventual U.N. resolutions.

But most of those visits are now perceived as photo opportunities, said Sanbar, editor of the online electronic newsletter, U.N. Forum.

Addressing reporters Tuesday, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, “At this time of turmoil, the next two weeks will highlight again the indispensable role of the United Nations in tackling global threats and seizing opportunities for common progress.”

He said the new session of the General Assembly will be “a pivotal period for our efforts to defeat poverty and adopt a new generation of sustainable development goals.

“Action on climate change is urgent. The more we delay, the more we will pay in lives and in money,” he said, on the eve of the heavily-hyped U.N. Climate Summit next week.

Ban also announced the appointment of Hollywood movie star Leonardo DiCaprio as “our newest United Nations Messenger of Peace, with a special focus on climate change issues.”

Williams told IPS the U.S. delegation then and for a long time afterwards suffered from a national diffidence about the United Nations.

He pointed out U.S. Congressional right-wingers continually harassed the United Nations with cut appropriations, while Democrats, with an eye to their more rabidly pro-Israeli lobbyists, would not cross the road to defend it.

Even the fact that there was money to repair the leaky Assembly Hall is result of the change of American attitude, he added.

But controversy at least creates noise. Now there is a deafening silence, said Williams.

“What happened to all those loons who thought U.N. peacekeepers would take over the United States with their black helicopters?” he asked. “And who remembers the U.N. land grab through World Heritage Sites, or the martyred GIs (U.S. soldiers) who refused to wear blue berets?”

Williams said one hopes they switched to new hobby horses, such as Benghazi, U.S. President Barack Obama’s birth certificate and similar distractions, rather than that the U.N. has become irrelevant.

“Because while the leaders will tut-tut from the podium about the strategic and seemingly insoluble problems – Ukraine/Russia, Syria/Iraq – the assembled leaders will still be in a position to assist the U.N. in serious issues: the flooding of the basement during Hurricane Sandy brought Climate Change home to Turtle Bay.”

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is doing his best to concentrate the minds of assembled leaders on restarting effective negotiations on a Climate Change pact, said Williams.

“He will probably get better results with that than uniting the members on Syria,” he noted.

Sanbar told IPS when former General Assembly President Razali Ismail of Malaysia cautioned in 1996 about “creeping irrelevance” of these gatherings, he was almost branded a rebel.

“Now heads of key states dash in and out, mainly competing to speak on the first two days, while others who may be have been actually visiting New York a week before do not bother to show up at all,” he added.

“Even our own substantive star, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who admirably maintained the momentum on climate change, seems to feel a need to bring in a Hollywood star for that purpose.

“It would be a Titanic if Leonardo de Caprio gets the Noble Peace Prize for that one,” said Sanbar, who thinks the secretary-general is making a case for the Nobel Peace Prize for his vigorous campaign on climate change.

Referring to the expansion of the General Assembly hall, Sanbar recounted that when the first expansion was planned, the architects sought to be very forward-looking to the year 1990 by designing it for 120 delegations (almost double the original members).

“On an equally sarcastic note,” he added, “you may explore a potential seat for Beyonce,” the celebrated singer, song writer and actress.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

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

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 10 2014 (IPS)

As the United Nations continues negotiations on a new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for its post-2015 development agenda, population experts are hoping reproductive health will be given significant recognition in the final line-up of the goals later this year.

At the same time, an upcoming Special Session of the General Assembly in mid-September may further strengthen reproductive rights and the right to universal family planning."Advocates are rallying to ensure that SRHR remains as central to the next set of goals as it is to women's lives." -- Gina Sarfaty

Gina Sarfaty of the Washington-based Population Action International (PAI) told IPS, “We are at a critical juncture for sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR).”

As the conversation around the next set of SDGs begins to heat up, she said, “Advocates are rallying to ensure that SRHR remains as central to the next set of goals as it is to women’s lives.

“The stakes are high, and the need for action is paramount,” cautioned Sarfaty, a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) specialist and research associate at PAI.

World population, currently at over 7.2 billion, is projected to increase by 3.7 billion people by 2100. Much of this growth will occur in developing countries, with 64 percent concentrated in just 10 countries, according to PAI.

In eight of these nations – Nigeria, Tanzania, Democratic Republic of Congo, Niger, Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya and Zambia – an important driver of population growth is persistently high fertility.

The remaining two countries accounting for the world’s increase – India and the United States – are those with already large populations and high net migration.

The ongoing negotiations for SDGs take place against the run-up to the upcoming special session of the General Assembly commemorating the 20th anniversary of the 1994 landmark International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo.

The special session, to be attended by several heads of state, is scheduled to take place Sep. 22 during the 69th session of the General Assembly.

Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, under-secretary-general and executive director of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), told IPS the principles set at the ICPD in 1994 are as relevant today as they were 20 years ago.

“But we need to act strong and fast to realise the Cairo vision and achieve universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights, including family planning,” he added.

The special session presents the perfect opportunity for governments, at the highest level, to recommit to its success and to renew their political support for actions required to fully achieve the goals and objectives of its Programme of Action and achieve sustainable development, he said.

This will also place the Cairo principles firmly in the post-2015 development agenda, said Dr. Osotimehin, a former Nigerian minister of health.

Purnima Mane, president and chief executive officer of Pathfinder International, told IPS the September meeting represents an opportunity for world leaders to assess progress made over the past 20 years against the goals and strategies developed in 1994, identify any remaining gaps in performance that require increased attention and investment, and realign their efforts moving forward.

“This is a very important session for all of us working on sexual and reproductive health since it provides a critical forum for reaffirming and unifying international commitment to ICPD goals and for making an added push to do more on areas and in countries where we are lagging,” she said.

Asked why there wasn’t a follow-up international conference, perhaps an ICPD+20 on the lines of the Rio+20 environment conference in 2012, Mane said the Cairo Programme of Action developed a very forward-looking agenda and set the bar high for the international community 20 years ago.

She said its goals are still relevant and actionable, and the agenda is unfortunately not yet finished.

“My sense is that having a follow-up conference in such an environment was seen as neither strategic nor a good use of resources,” Mane said.

The upcoming special session “is intended to heighten focus on the goals established in the 1994 Programme of Action, stimulate discussion around what we will do to complete the unfinished agenda, re-engage on commitments already made and also push for more.

“I would hope the upcoming U.N. session will highlight the need to include sexual and reproductive health and rights upfront as a core component of the Sustainable Development Goals as the Open Working Group continues to develop its proposal,” said Mane, who oversees sexual and reproductive health programmes in more than 20 developing nations on an annual budget of over 100 million dollars.

Asked about the current status of world population growth, PAI’s Sarfaty told IPS that despite the fact that mortality has declined substantially, women in sub-Saharan Africa currently have more than five children on average, representing a modest decrease from the average of 6.5 children they had in the 1950s.

Compared to Latin America and Asia, she said, a slower pace of fertility decline has characterised sub-Saharan Africa, with stalls and even reversals along the way.

Of 22 countries where recent survey data is available, 10 are transitioning towards lower childbearing while 12 are currently experiencing fertility stalls.

“Therefore, the expectation that fertility will steadily decline in Africa, as the U.N. projects, will not hold without concerted policy and programme effort,” she warned.

The polar opposite fertility scenario is happening in the high income countries with low levels of fertility.

It is estimated that 48 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where women have fewer than 2.1 children on average in their lifetimes, she pointed out.

While fertility rates in these countries may be below replacement level, their need for family planning does not disappear, she declared.

Sarfaty said family planning use continued in Iran, for example, after the government discontinued its funding of family planning programmes in an attempt to encourage higher birth rates.

In addition to being ineffective, restricting access to family planning also restricts the right of a woman to determine her family size, she added.

Meanwhile, in a report released Thursday, the United Nations said the world’s population is increasingly urban, with more than half living in urban areas today and another 2.5 billion expected by 2050.

With nearly 38 million people, Tokyo tops U.N.’s ranking of most populous cities followed by Delhi, Shanghai, Mexico City, Sao Paulo and Mumbai.

The largest urban growth will take place in India, China and Nigeria: three countries accounting for 37 per cent of the projected growth of the world’s urban population between 2014 and 2050.

By 2050, India is projected to add 404 million urban dwellers, China 292 million and Nigeria 212 million.

Excerpt:

The 132-member Group of 77, the largest single coalition of developing nations, has urged Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to provide, “as soon as possible…alternative options for banking services” in New York City following the mass cancellation of bank accounts of U.N. missions and foreign diplomats.

The draft resolution, a copy of which was obtained by IPS, is an “agreed text” which has the blessings of all 132 countries, plus China.

Responding to a demand by member states for reciprocal retaliation, the G77 requests the secretary-general to review the “U.N. Secretariat’s financial relations with the JP Morgan Chase Bank and consider alternatives to such financial institutions and to report thereon, along with the information requested.”

Chase bank handles billions of dollars in the accounts maintained by the United Nations and its agencies in New York City. Credit: UN Photo/Milton Grant

Currently, the bank handles billions of dollars in the accounts maintained by the United Nations and its agencies in New York City.

The Group expresses “deep concern” over the decisions made by several banking institutions, including JP Morgan Chase, in closing bank accounts of mostly developing countries, and diplomats accredited to the United Nations and their relatives.

The resolution, which is subject to amendments, cites the 1947 U.S.- U.N. headquarters agreement that “guarantees the rights, obligations and the fulfillment of responsibilities by member states towards the United Nations, under the United Nations Charter and international law.”

Additionally, it cites the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations as a regulatory framework for states and international organisations, in particular the working relationship between the United Nations and the City of New York.

Citing the two agreements, the G77 is calling for all “necessary measures to ensure permanent missions accredited to the United Nations and their staff are granted equal, fair and non-discriminatory treatment by the banking system.”

Asked for an official response, U.N. Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told IPS: “We would not comment on a draft resolution.”

At a closed-door meeting of the G77 last month, speaker after speaker lambasted banks in the city for selectively cutting off the banking system from the diplomatic community, describing the action as “outrageous”.

Their anger was directed mostly at JP Morgan Chase (formerly Chemical bank) which was once considered part of the U.N. family – and a preferred bank by most diplomats – and at one time was housed in the secretariat building.

The G77 is expected to hold consultations with member states outside the Group, specifically Western nations, before tabling the resolution with the 193-member General Assembly later this month.

If any proposed amendments are aimed at weakening the resolution, the G77 will go for a vote in the Assembly with its agreed text, a G77 diplomat told IPS Thursday.

But with the Group having more than two-thirds majority in the Assembly, the resolution is expected to be adopted either with or without the support of Western nations.

If adopted by a majority vote, the secretary-general is expected to abide by the resolution and respond to its demands.

The draft resolution also requests the secretary-general to review and report to the General Assembly, within 120 days of its adoption, “of any obstacles or impediments observed in the accounts of permanent missions or their staff at the JP Morgan Chase Bank in the City of New York, and the impact these impediments have on the adequate functioning of their offices.”

And to this end, the G77 invites all members to provide the secretary-general with relevant information that will facilitate the elaboration of such report.

In an appeal to the United States, the G77 has also underscored the importance of the host country taking the necessary measures to ensure that personal data and information of persons affected by the closure of accounts is kept confidential by banking institutions, and requests the secretary-general to work with the host country in that regard and to report to the General Assembly within 90 days.

The closure of accounts was triggered by a request from the U.S. treasury, which wanted all banks to meticulously report every single transaction of some 70 “blacklisted” U.N. diplomatic missions, and individual diplomats – perhaps as part of a monitoring system to prevent money laundering and terrorism financing.

But the banks have said such an elaborate exercise is administratively expensive and cumbersome.

And as a convenient alternative, they have closed down, or are in the process of closing down, all accounts, shutting off banks from the diplomatic community in New York.

Workmen clear a road blocked by a landslide in Trinidad. Compensation for loss and damage from climate change has become a major demand of developing countries. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, Mar 24 2014 (IPS)

Can Caribbean governments take legal action against other countries that they believe are warming the planet with devastating consequences?

A former regional diplomat argues the answer is yes. Ronald Sanders, who is also a senior research fellow at London University, says such legal action would require all Small Island Developing States (SIDS) acting together."There is a moral case to be raised at the United Nations...It would require great leadership, great courage and great unity." -- Ronald Sanders

He believes the Hague-based International Court of Justice (ICJ) would be amenable to hearing their arguments, although the court’s requirement that all parties to a dispute agree to its jurisdiction would be a major stumbling block.

“It is most unlikely that the countries that are warming the planet, which incidentally now include India and China, not just the United States, Canada and the European Union…[that] they would agree to jurisdiction,” Sanders told IPS.

“The alternative, if countries wanted to press the issue of compensation for the destruction caused by climate change, is that they would have to go to the United Nations General Assembly.”

Sanders said that the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries could “as a group put forward a resolution stating the case that they do believe, and there is evidence to support it, that climate change and global warming is having a material effect… on the integrity of their countries.

“We’re seeing coastal areas vanishing and we know that if sea level rise continues large parts of existing islands will disappear and some of them may even be submerged, so the evidence is there.”

Sanders pointed to the damaging effects of flooding and landslides in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, St. Lucia, and Dominica as 2013 came to an end.

The prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, described the flooding and landslides as “unprecedented” and gave a preliminary estimate of damage in his country alone to be in excess of 60 million dollars.

“People who live in the Caribbean know from their own experience that climate change is real,” Sanders said.

“They know it from days and nights that are hotter than in the past, from more frequent and more intense hurricanes or freak years like the last one when there were none, from long periods of dry weather followed by unseasonal heavy rainfall and flooding, and from the recognisable erosion of coastal areas and reefs.”

For the first time in several years, Antigua’s main water source, Potworks Reservoir, has run out of water as drought continues. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

At the U.N. climate talks in Warsaw last November, developing countries fought hard for the creation of a third pillar of a new climate treaty to be finalised in 2015. After two weeks and 36 straight hours of negotiations, they finally won the International Mechanism for Loss and Damage (IMLD), to go with the mitigation (emissions reduction) and adaptation pillars.

The details of that mechanism will be hammered out at climate talks in Bonn this June, and finally in Paris the following year. As chair of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), Nauru will be present at a meeting in New Delhi next week of the BASIC group (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) to try and build a common platform for the international talks.

“It isn’t just the Caribbean, of course,” Sanders said. “A number of other countries in the world – the Pacific countries – are facing an even more pressing danger than we are at the moment. There are countries in Africa that are facing this problem, and countries in Asia,” he told IPS.

“Now if they all join together, there is a moral case to be raised at the United Nations and maybe that is the place at which we would more effectively press it if we acted together. It would require great leadership, great courage and great unity,” he added.

Pointing to the OECD countries, Sir Ronald said they act together, consult with each other and come up with a programme which they then say is what the international standard must be and the developing countries must accept it.

“Why do the developing countries not understand that we could reverse that process? We can stand up together and say look, this is what we are demanding and the developed countries would then have to listen to what the developing countries are saying,” Sir Ronald said.

Following their recent 25th inter-sessional meeting in St. Vincent, Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller praised the increased focus that CARICOM leaders have placed on the issue of climate change, especially in light of the freak storm last year that devastated St. Lucia, Dominica and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

At that meeting, heads of government agreed on the establishment of a task force on climate change and SIDS to provide guidance to Caribbean climate change negotiators, their ministers and political leaders in order to ensure the strategic positioning of the region in the negotiations.

In Antigua, where drought has persisted for months, water catchments are quickly drying up. The water manager at the state-owned Antigua Public utilities Authority (APUA), Ivan Rodrigues, blames climate change.

“We know that the climate is changing and what we need to do is to cater for it and deal with it,” he told IPS.

But he is not sold on the idea of international legal action against the large industrialised countries.

“I think what will cause [a reversal of their practices] is consumer activism,” he said. “The argument may not be strong enough for a court of law to actually penalise a government.”

But Sanders firmly believes an opinion from the International Court of Justice would make a huge difference.

“We could get an opinion. If the United Nations General Assembly were to accept a resolution that, say, we want an opinion from the International Court of Jurists on this matter, I think we could get an opinion that would be favourable to a case for the Caribbean and other countries that are affected by climate change,” he told IPS.

“If there was a case where countries, governments and large companies knew that if they continue these harmful practices, action would be taken against them, of course they would change their position because at the end of the day they want to be profitable and successful. They don’t want to be having to fight court cases and losing them and then having to pay compensation,” he added.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon speaks at the 2013 Annual Awards Dinner and Dance of the U.N. Correspondents Association (UNCA), honouring winners of prizes for best media coverage of the U.N. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 27 2013 (IPS)

When the U.N. Correspondents Association (UNCA) held its annual award ceremony last week, one of the video highlights was a hilarious skit on the clumsy attempts to bug the 38th floor offices of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Three days later, the New York Times ran an updated story about the widespread electronic surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain’s spy agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which had targeted over 1,000 political leaders, diplomats, and international institutions."Let's hope the spirit of hopeless resignation is finally set aside and serious consideration given to privacy at the U.N." -- James Paul

These included the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF and the Geneva-based U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR).

At last week’s award ceremony, the secretary-general was given an unsolicited piece of light-hearted advice: if you want to figure out whether your office is bugged, you only have to sneeze loudly, and a voice from inside the walls would instinctively and courteously respond, “Bless you.”

Jokes apart, the 193-member General Assembly last week adopted a unanimous resolution highly critical of electronic surveillance and demanding “the right to privacy in the digital age.”

Not surprisingly, the resolution was co-sponsored by Brazil and Germany, whose leaders were wiretapped by the NSA.

Although both countries publicly lambasted the surveillance, the resolution does not single out either the United States or Britain by name.

“This was due to two reasons,” a Third World diplomat told IPS. “One, to ensure the resolution was adopted unanimously, with no negative votes and abstentions, and two, both Brazil and Germany were obviously under strong political pressure not to name names.”

As a result, he noted, the resolution was “lamentably weak – and the culprits got away.”

Asked for a response, the Brazilian ministry of external relations, through its public relations firm in New York, remained tight-lipped.

James A. Paul, who served for 19 years as executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum, told IPS it was long past due for this issue to be addressed at the United Nations.

“Electronic espionage has been especially abusively practiced in the U.N. environment and cases are very well known,” he said.

He pointed out that diplomats have been furious about this for years but many have been reluctant to take up the matter and risk the ill-will of the mighty, especially the United States and UK – “the prime offenders”.

“In addition to the resolution, let’s hope the spirit of hopeless resignation is finally set aside and serious consideration given to privacy at the U.N., where much needs to be done to bring the powerful into conformity with international law,” said Paul, who has written extensively on the politics of the world body.

Samir Sanbar, a former assistant secretary-general who was primarily responsible for the U.N. presence on the internet with the 1995 launch of the U.N. website, told IPS, “My general impression is that while political officials make public statements, security representatives arrange for discreet deals.”

And that may explain eventual changes in negotiated texts of the resolution, he said.

In certain circles, bugging was so common that a diplomat excluded from monitoring may have felt insulted, said Sanbar, who served under five different U.N. secretaries-general.

He recalled a long telephone conversation once between a former secretary-general and a pivotal head of state in the Middle East on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

After the call, the secretary general wondered with a wry smile: How many countries would have been listening [to our conversation]?”

He said on occasions even those directly involved resorted to public exposure when it suited them.

Still, Paul told IPS the General Assembly resolution is a very welcome initiative in the worldwide battle over mass electronic information-gathering.

He said recent revelations have made it clear there is an increasing intrusion of states – particularly the U.S. – into the private lives of all citizens, not only those within their national jurisdictions but worldwide.

“This battle involves first and foremost public opinion. Citizens must bring pressure on states to end or at least greatly restrict these practices,” he said.

Paul pointed out that a U.N. resolution will not have a binding effect but it will be part of a shift of opinion.

A recent open letter by famous authors is also part of this process as is the initiative of top executives in the internet industry, he noted.

“The resolution may disappoint some who would like to see stronger language. But in fact this resolution is well-crafted to win broad support and thus to have the maximum moral authority,” he added.

In a statement released last week, the Brazilian ministry of external relations said it was “greatly satisfied” with the consensus resolution.

And it “demonstrates the recognition, within the international community, of universal principles upheld by Brazil, such as protecting the right to privacy and freedom of expression, especially against extraterritorial actions of States in regard to data collection, monitoring and interception of communications.”

The statement also noted the resolution was “innovative in affirming the recognition that the rights of citizens must be protected both ‘offline’ and ‘online’, and provides for steps to continue the dialogue and to deepen discussions over the coming months, at the United Nations, on the right to privacy in electronic communications.”

Meanwhile, the resolution requests U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay to present a report on “the protection and promotion of the right to privacy in the context of domestic and extra-territorial surveillance and/or interception of digital communications and collection of personal data, including on a mass scale.”

This report is to be submitted to the Human Rights Council and to the General Assembly in 2014, “with views and recommendations, to be considered by Member States.”

Virtually all of the revelations of electronic spying have been sourced to documents released by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, currently living in exile in Russia, and a fugitive from U.S. law enforcement agencies who have accused him of espionage.

The electronic surveillance of German Chancellor Angela Merkel (left, pictured with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon) reportedly goes back to 2002, even before she was elected to office. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 28 2013 (IPS)

When the 193-member General Assembly adopts a resolution next month censuring the illegal electronic surveillance of governments and world leaders by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), the U.N.’s highest policy-making body will spare the United States from public condemnation despite its culpability in widespread wiretapping.

A draft resolution currently in limited circulation – a copy of which was obtained by IPS – criticises “the conduct of extra-territorial surveillance” and the “interception of communications in foreign jurisdictions”.

But it refuses to single out the NSA or the United States, which stands accused of spying on foreign governments, including political leaders in Germany, France, Brazil, Spain and Mexico, among some 30 others.

The draft says that while the gathering and protection of certain sensitive information may be justified on grounds of national security and criminal activity, member states must still ensure full compliance with international human rights.

The resolution will also emphasise “that illegal surveillance of private communications and the indiscriminate interception of personal data of citizens constitutes a highly intrusive act that violates the rights to freedom of expression and privacy, and threatens the foundations of a democratic society.”

Additionally, it will call for the establishment of independent oversight mechanisms capable of ensuring transparency and accountability of state surveillance of communications.

And the resolution will request the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi PIllay, to present an interim report on the issue of human rights and “indiscriminate surveillance, including on extra-territorial surveillance.”

This report is to be presented to the 69^th session of the General Assembly next September, and a final report to its 70th session in 2015.

Chakravarthi Raghavan, a veteran Indian journalist who has been reporting on the U.N. and its activities since the 1960s, both in New York and later in Geneva, told IPS the resolution may help start a process under which the national security interests of every state, international security and right to privacy and human rights of people can be discussed and a balance found in some universal forum.

“Otherwise, the U.N. world order will break down, and no one will benefit or emerge unscathed,” he said.

Much will depend on the follow-up action that the General Assembly resolution calls for, and with what tenacity members pursue it.

“Frankly, I am not at all clear that some of the nations raising the issue now are really serious,” said Raghavan, editor-emeritus of the Geneva-based South-North Development Monitor SUNS. “If they were, any one of them in Europe would have granted asylum to Edward Snowden, and not play footsie with U.S. in its attempts to have him jailed in the U.S. on espionage charges.”

The revelations of U.S. spying have come mostly from documents released by Snowden, a former NSA contractor, who sought political asylum in Russia after he was accused of espionage by the United States.

One Third World diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS the draft could undergo changes by the time it reaches the General Assembly mid-November.

But he held out little hope the final resolution will specifically castigate the United States because of the political clout it wields at the United Nations, and Washington’s notoriety for exerting diplomatic pressure on its allies and aid recipients.

Besides which, he said, everybody plays the spying game, including the French, the Germans, the Chinese and the Russians — and therefore none of them can afford to take a “holier than thou” attitude.

Still, as the New York Times put it last week, “One thing is clear: the NSA’s Cold War-era argument, that everyone does it, seems unlikely to win the day.”

The co-sponsors of the resolution are Germany and Brazil, whose political leaders have already condemned the United States for electronically breaking into their communications networks. According to published reports Monday, the electronic surveillance of German Chancellor Angela Merkel goes back to 2002, even before she was elected to office.

The German magazine Der Spiegel said over the weekend that NSA spying in Germany originated in the U.S. embassy in Berlin.

There has been a longstanding tradition that the “Five Eyes” do not spy on each other, the five being the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. But the surveillance of European political leaders has triggered a strong rejoinder from the 28-member European Union (EU).

Raghavan told IPS that even if other countries are not publicly feuding with the U.S. over this — and perhaps their own security apparatuses are secretly collaborating in this global “surveillance state” — the NSA activities at a minimum raise several systemic issues involving basic violations.

These include violations of the U.N. Charter; “unauthorised” and blatantly illegal invasions and/or intrusions into national space; World Trade Organisation (WTO) agreements, in particular the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS); the International Telecommunication Union Treaty and Conventions; treaties and protocols of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO); the Universal Human Rights Declaration and conventions; and the Vienna diplomatic conventions and codes of behaviour among civilised nations.

“All these strike at the roots of the very basics of international law and international public law,” he said.

Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister of Bangladesh, says her country faces a triple nuclear threat literally at her doorstep, from India, China and Pakistan. Credit: UN Photo/JC McIlwaine

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 3 2013 (IPS)

The General Assembly’s first-ever high-level meeting on nuclear disarmament closed last week on a predictable note: the longstanding proposal for the elimination of nuclear weapons remains firmly in the realm of political fantasy.

The one-day meeting, referred to by insiders as the HLM, provided no concrete assurances from any of the world’s five declared nuclear powers – the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia – for a world free of nuclear weapons."The greatest impact comes when there is popular pressure...for nuclear disarmament and abolition." -- Joseph Gerson of the American Friends Service Committee

Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister of Bangladesh, told delegates her country was perhaps the only country facing a triple nuclear threat literally at her doorstep. The South Asian nation lives in dangerous proximity to not one but three nuclear powers: India, China and Pakistan.

She rightly pointed out that her country has “good reasons to worry about these vicious weapons”.

Hasina called for the establishment, as an interim measure, of nuclear-free zones in South Asia and the Middle East.

But a long-delayed international conference on the creation of a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East was postponed last year and remains in limbo, mired in the politics of the region.

Asked if last week’s high-level meeting produced anything concrete, Joseph Gerson of the American Friends Service Committee, a strong anti-nuclear advocate, told IPS “one cannot expect miracles or enormous breakthroughs at the HLM or similar multinational disarmament forums”.

“The greatest impact comes when there is popular pressure, and social movement demands from below, for nuclear disarmament and abolition, as we saw in the 1950s, early 60s, and the freeze era of the late 1970s and early ’80s.”

That said, the fact that the HLM was held, with 74 heads of state, foreign ministers, ambassadors and other foreign ministry personnel speaking, reflects the continuing commitment of the vast majority of the world’s nations to achieve a nuclear weapons free world, as required by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Gerson pointed out.

“These demands and the increasing isolation of the United States and Israel in such forums is something those of us who are U.S. Americans need to be teaching our compatriots,” he added.

Until the HLM, he said, the U.S. and other P5 states (Britain, France, China and Russia) had boycotted such multilateral disarmament conferences, most recently the Oslo Conference on the Humanitarian Consequences of Nuclear Weapons.

“So, tiny and incremental as it may be, the fact that the administration [of U.S. President Barack Obama] was represented in the HLM, albeit by low-level officials and defensively, reflects the reality that it cannot indefinitely ignore the demands of the majority of the world’s nations,” he added.

Jayantha Dhanapala, a former U.N. under-secretary-general for disarmament affairs, told IPS last month that unless disarmament becomes a priority for possessor states, “speeches and meetings alone are not going to change the stark dangers posed by this most destructive weapon of mass destruction”.

A decision to outlaw nuclear weapons in the same way as biological and chemical weapons is essential, he stressed, and the time to start negotiations on a Nuclear Weapon Convention is not tomorrow but now.

Long before the meeting concluded, delegates were readying for two key upcoming meetings early next year.

Firstly, an international conference on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons scheduled to take place in Mexico in February 2014.

And secondly, a ministerial meeting of the Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Initiative (NPDI) to be held in Hiroshima, Japan in April 2014.

Ray Acheson, director of Reaching Critical Will, a programme of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), told IPS the HLM provided an opportunity for governments to be bold and visionary in a way that other fora dealing with nuclear issues do not.

She said governments aren’t constrained by having to adopt a consensus outcome or negotiate an agreement. Rather, they can say exactly what they think.

In that sense, she said, what would have been a good outcome for the HLM was a series of forward-looking statements condemning the continued possession of and reliance on nuclear weapons and calling for their banning and elimination.

This could help governments – especially those free of nuclear weapons – to mobilise more effectively against nuclear weapons, she added.

Outside of the HLM, foreign ministers and high-level representatives from the 183 member states who are parties to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) issued an urgent call last week to the eight remaining states – China, North Korea, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, Pakistan and the United States – to sign and ratify the CTBT.

According to guidelines of the CTBT, ratification by these eight countries is necessary for the treaty’s entry into force.

Gerson told IPS the HLM also provided non-nuclear states an opportunity to continue pressing the U.S. and other nuclear powers to fulfill their Article VI Nuclear Non-Proliferating Treaty (NPT) obligations and to fulfill the obligations agreed in the Action Plan of the 2010 NPT Review Conference.

This includes a commitment to hold a conference on the creation of a Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone, as well as planning among themselves – most impressively by the Nonaligned Movement – ways to exert greater pressure on the nuclear powers.

On the sidelines, the HLM drew civil society and disarmament activists from across the U.S. and internationally to New York.

This “provid[ed] us the opportunity to share information to develop plans for the remainder of the Obama administration, especially as we approach the Mexico Follow-On Conference on the Human Consequences of Nuclear Weapons, the 100th anniversary of the First World War, and the 2015 NPT Review Conference,” said Gerson.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the U.N. General Assembly on Oct. 1, 2013. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 2 2013 (IPS)

Like the proverbial skunk at the garden party, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used his turn at the podium at the U.N. General Assembly Tuesday to pour scorn on Iran’s new president, 96 hours after a smiling Hassan Rouhani departed New York after a momentous four-day stay that raised unprecedented hopes for détente with the United States and the West.

Echoing his early assessment of the Iranian leader, Netanyahu described Rouhani as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing, a wolf who thinks he can pull the eyes – the wool over the eyes of the international community”. He demanded that Iran completely abandon its nuclear programme as the price for lifting existing sanctions against Tehran.“Clearly, Rouhani had scored some points in his latest visit. This was Netanyahu's way of trying to even the score." -- Gary Sick

“The international community has Iran on the ropes,” Netanyahu said in reference to U.S.-led economic sanctions. “If you want to knock out Iran’s nuclear weapons programme peacefully, don’t let up the pressure. Keep it up.

“If Iran advances its nuclear weapons program during negotiations, strengthen the sanctions,” he added.

In a speech that dwelt almost exclusively on Iran, the Israeli leader also suggested, as he has oftentimes in the past, that he was prepared to order unilateral military action against Tehran’s nuclear facilities.

“If Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone,” he declared. “And in standing alone, Israel will know that we are defending many, many others.”

Netanyahu’s speech, which came just four days after a telephone conversation between Rouhani and Barack Obama – the first between the leaders of the U.S. and Iran since 1979, followed a more restrained performance by the Israeli leader here Monday during his White House meeting with the U.S. president.

At that meeting, he contented himself with advising that Iran’s “conciliatory words must be met with real actions” – a point which Obama himself has stressed since last week’s momentous events – although Netanyahu also emphasised that “the ultimate test of a future agreement with Iran is whether or not Iran dismantles its military nuclear programme.”

Netanyahu’s appearance here and at the U.N. this week in some ways could not come at a worse time for the Israeli leader for a variety of reasons, not least of which was the extremely positive impression left behind by Rouhani and his foreign minister and former U.N. ambassador, Javad Zarif.

Zarif remains in New York both to continue consultations with key U.S. opinion-shapers and prepare for the Oct. 15-16 negotiations between Iran and the so-called P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, China, Russia plus Germany) in Geneva on Iran’s nuclear programme.

The message conveyed repeatedly by both Iranians in an intense, seemingly non-stop stream of meetings with influential media figures, Iranian Americans, think-tank scholars, and former senior U.S. diplomats and other officials – not to mention Thursday’s 30-minute one-on-one exchange between Zarif and Secretary of State John Kerry on the sidelines of a ministerial meeting of the P5+1 attended by Zarif – was that Tehran was prepared to negotiate verifiable limits to its nuclear programme so long as its right to enrich uranium under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was recognised and sanctions were lifted.

After those meetings were capped by Obama’s 15-minute phone call to Rouhani as the latter was being driven to JFK airport for his return flight to Iran, the atmosphere surrounding the visit turned almost euphoric, comparable in some ways to Washington’s rapprochement with China in the early 1970s.

Media commentators on weekend talk shows and columnists in U.S. newspapers called the visit “historic” and a potential “turning point” in U.S. relations with a country which it has treated as an enemy for some 34 years.

“The Israeli government has clearly been rattled by the Iranian charm offensive,” noted the New York Times in what has to be considered an understatement given what it called the “dizzying diplomatic developments” set off by Rouhani’s visit.

But aside from being thrown off-balance by Rouhani’s success, Netanyahu also faced an unusual public-relations problem this week: Tuesday’s partial shutdown of the U.S. government resulting from the budgetary impasse between the White House and the Republican-led House of Representatives dominated the news agenda, effectively diminishing Netanyahu’s customary command of the media spotlight and hence, his message.

But even his message – particularly, his demands that Iran completely dismantle its nuclear programme and abandon its right to enrich under the NPT – has come to be viewed by a large consensus of Iran and foreign-policy specialists here as a non-starter for negotiations and clearly identifies Israel as a spoiler.

“We all know that the chance of a [negotiated] settlement is reduced to near zero when we start with pre-conditions that Iran must totally dismantle its entire scientific infrastructure,” said Gary Sick, an Iran specialist at Columbia University who served on the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan.

“Limits yes, but the days of zero or near-zero centrifuges are long past,” he told IPS.

Indeed, key figures in the Israel lobby, including Dennis Ross, counselor of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a spin-off of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), has argued for more than a year that Washington should test Iran on whether it will accept strict limits on its enrichment programme and, if so, accept it in exchange for eliminating sanctions.

Indeed, as early as 2011, when Ross was still serving as Obama’s chief Iran aide, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton strongly hinted that Washington could eventually accept a peaceful nuclear programme that included some enrichment capabilities.

Even as Rouhani’s U.N. sojourn was unfolding last week, David Harris, the head of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), another major Israel lobby group, warned Netanyahu that his dismissive attitude – as evidenced then by Israel’s boycott of Rouhani’s speech to the General Assembly — toward the Iranian leader risked isolating Israel.

“Did [the boycott] help or hurt Israel to make its case?” he asked in Israel’s ‘Haaretz’ newspaper. “Some would argue it helped by stressing the danger and willingness to act, even if alone. Others, however, would say that Israel only demonstrated its unwillingness to hear the message, even if Rouhani turns out to be, say, the next Mikhail Gorbachev.”

Indeed, Sick said Netanyahu sounded “defensive and shrill” in his U.N. speech Tuesday. “Clearly, Rouhani had scored some points in his latest visit. This was Netanyahu’s way of trying to even the score.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Sudan’s beleaguered president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who threatened to visit the United Nations despite an arrest warrant for war crimes, has backed out at the 59th minute of the eleventh hour.

Sudanese President Omer Hassan Al Bashir addresses a ceremony marking the fourth anniversary of the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in January 2009. Credit: UN Photo/Tim McKulka

Although he was listed as a speaker Thursday, ahead of President Christopher Loeak of the Marshall Islands and immediately after Croatian President Dr. Ivo Josipovic, al-Bashir decided to skip the high-level debate of the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) which has attracted world leaders from 193 member states.

Asked to confirm the president’s absence, U.N. Associate Spokesperson Farhan Haq told IPS that Sudan had informed U.N. protocol that President al-Bashir will not attend the General Assembly sessions.

Jose Luis Diaz, head of the U.N. office of Amnesty International, told IPS he was not really surprised that al-Bashir had finally “dropped the charade of coming to the United Nations”.

“I hope the revulsion caused by the announcement of his intention to attend the UNGA is translated by responsible states into real efforts to apprehend him and send him to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague,” he said.

Under the 1947 U.N.-U.S. Headquarters Agreement Act, the United States, in its capacity as host country to the world body, is obligated to allow state representatives to attend meetings at the United Nations.

But the Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC), a global network of civil society organisations working to strengthen international cooperation with ICC, has urged the United Nations to review its policies.

CICC convenor William Pace pointed out that major international organisations such as the African Union (AU), the Organisation of American States (OAS) and the European Union (EU) do not allow the participation of representatives of governments that are not considered legitimate – specifically those representing governments resulting from military coups.

“The United Nations should follow these principles and not allow the participation of representatives who are fugitives from international justice,” he added.

Any such decision, however, has to be taken by the General Assembly since Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is not empowered to bar representatives from any member states from participating in U.N. meetings.

Asked about the proposed visit, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Powers told reporters last week she had seen published reports that al-Bashir intends to travel to New York.

“President al-Bashir, as you know, stands accused of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity by the ICC,” she said. Such a trip “would be deplorable, cynical and hugely inappropriate”.

“We would suggest that given that he is under those charges, and that the ICC has indicted him, again, on genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity charges that it would be more appropriate for him to present himself to the ICC and travel to The Hague.”

After learning of al-Bashir’s intent to attend the General Assembly, civil society members of the CICC immediately took action, exploring all possible legal avenues to block the visit and calling for all parties involved – the U.S., the U.N. and all member states – to bar his attendance or arrest him, CICC said in a statement released Thursday.

Ambassador Tiina Intelmann, president of the ICC’s Assembly of States Parties, reminded ICC member states over whose territory Al-Bashir’s flight path might take him of their obligations to arrest him, as well as the obligations of all member states to cooperate with the court’s investigation in Darfur.

Pace said al-Bashir should be standing in front of ICC judges in The Hague, not circulating among world leaders at the U.N. He added that al-Bashir’s decision not to attend the General Assembly comes immediately after a trip to Nigeria for an AU health summit “which saw him unexpectedly leave after less than 24 hours in the country”.

“Civil society had encouraged Nigeria to arrest al-Bashir or bar his entry, and the Nigerian Coalition for the ICC filed a petition in the Nigerian courts seeking to compel his arrest,” Pace said.

Giving the highest platform at the United Nations to a man who has arrest warrants issued accusing him of committing the most heinous crimes against humanity would be an insult to the Charter, to the United Nations, to the secretary-general, to the Security Council and to the international community, declared Pace.

Children in drought-struck Camotán, in Chiquimula province, Guatemala, in 2010. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Olivier De Schutter, Jochen Flasbarth, and Dr. Hans R. Herren
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 25 2013 (IPS)

Reducing the proportion of undernourished people by half until 2015 was one of the Millennium Development Goals that the international community set in 2000. It will not be reached: At least 870 million people worldwide – and one child in five – still go hungry; this in a world where we already produce enough food today to feed nine billion people in 2050.

Further progress towards reaching this goal can be made in the remaining months, but we must ask ourselves what comes afterwards. The debate on the so-called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to be reached by 2030, has already begun. On Wednesday, Sep. 25, heads of states and governments will meet in New York."The aim here is not the maximum conceivable yield but a sustainable and environmentally supportable yield."

Defeating hunger remains a priority. This is not simply a matter of providing everyone with enough food; crucial for the future of all human beings is how this should happen.

“Food security and nutrition for all through sustainable agriculture and food systems” must be set as one of the fundamental goals of global development. It is therefore imperative for agricultural policy to change course, as requested in 2008 by IAASTD, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development. The same message was reiterated in the Rio+20 Declaration “The Future We Want”.

What constitutes sustainable agriculture?

Widely spread forms of industrial, conventional agriculture are not sustainable. With high-yielding varieties and a heavy reliance on fertilisers, water, pesticides, and energy, it has delivered impressive yield increases, but only by exhausting its own production base in the long run.

It not only depends on high levels of inputs, but also leaves behind degraded soils, polluted water, and depleted biodiversity. According to the often-cited IAASTD report, 1.9 billion hectares of land are already affected by degradation due to unsustainable use. This comes at an annual cost of around 40 billion dollars and negatively affects the livelihood of 1.5 billion people worldwide.

Industrial, conventional and certain forms of traditional agriculture are also major contributors to climate change. Meanwhile, the rural populations in developing countries remain mired in poverty.

This form of food production must be replaced by sustainable forms of agriculture, which maintain and restore natural soil fertility, protect water sources and promote biodiversity. Sustainable agriculture has economic and social benefits while remaining within the natural boundaries of our planet.

The aim here is not the maximum conceivable yield but a sustainable and environmentally supportable yield. This is certainly enough to nourish the nine billion people who will inhabit the earth by mid-century.

According to the “Green Economy Report” published in 2012 by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), food availability per capita could be increased through sustainable production methods by 14 percent, creating millions of new jobs in rural regions in the process, and thus alleviating poverty. At the same time, agriculture could reduce its ecological footprint.

The main players here are small-scale farmers. Worldwide, 70 percent of food production comes from small farms, which collectively use 40 percent of the world’s arable land. They would be able to nourish people in developing countries, but will have to be supported in this endeavour.

They need guarantees regarding the ownership and rights of use for their land, better access to education, information and markets, as well as fair prices for their products. Rural infrastructure and services are a key factor in this and must be promoted much more intensively by state and international authorities.

Above all, the position of women must be improved. Women play a key role in food production, but earn less and have fewer rights. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), equal access to education and agricultural resources in Africa would boost harvests by 20 to 30 percent.

A significant challenge that needs to be urgently addressed is food waste. Worldwide, a third of what is produced goes to waste. Developed countries have a particular responsibility to act: they throw away 222 million tonnes of food every year, which is approximately the annual harvest of sub-Saharan Africa.

Finally, a fairer trading environment is critical. The rules of agricultural trade will have to be adapted to take into account the needs of small-scale farmers. At present, this is not the case.

Developed countries need to reform their agricultural subsidies and trade policies. Government payments coupled to production, in addition to export subsidies, expose farmers in developing countries to unfair competition and can therefore impede their production. These subsidies must be converted to payments for ecosystem services and public goods.

Land grabbing, the acquisition of fertile land by financially strong investors over the interest of the local land users, must be stopped. Activities that exacerbate food price volatility, such as financial speculation on food commodity futures markets, must be reined in.

Food security and nutrition for all through sustainable agriculture and food systems

According to these models, a sustainable development goal should comprise the following elements:

1. End malnutrition and hunger in all of their forms, so that all people enjoy the right to adequate food at all times.

2. Ensure that all smallholders and rural communities, in particular women and disadvantaged groups, enjoy a decent livelihood and income, and secure their right to access productive resources, such as land and water, everywhere.

3. Achieve the transformation to sustainable, diverse and resilient agriculture and food systems that conserve natural resources and ecosystems. The loss of fertile land is not acceptable. Instead, land degradation must be minimised and inevitable degradation compensated through regeneration and restoration measures.

4. Minimise post-harvest food losses and food waste.

5. Establish inclusive, transparent, and equitable legislative and other decision-making processes on food, nutrition, and agriculture at all levels.

Olivier De Schutter is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food. Jochen Flasbarth is President of the Federal Environment Agency in Germany. Dr. Hans R. Herren is President of the Biovision Foundation in Zurich and the Millennium Institute in Washington.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff addresses the general debate of the sixty-eighth session of the General Assembly on Sep. 24, 2013. Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 24 2013 (IPS)

Throwing diplomatic protocol to the winds, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff launched a blistering attack on the United States for illegally infiltrating its communications network, surreptitiously intercepting phone calls, and breaking into the Brazilian Mission to the United Nations.

Departing from a longstanding tradition of closed-door diplomacy on bilateral disputes, she dropped a political bombshell on a room overflowing with world leaders, foreign ministers and ambassadors from 193 countries sitting in rapt silence.

Justifying her public criticism, she told delegates Tuesday that the problem of electronic surveillance goes beyond a bilateral relationship. “It affects the international community itself and demands a response from it.”

Rousseff said recent revelations concerning the activities of a global network of electronic espionage have caused indignation and repudiation in public opinion around the world.

But in Brazil, she said, “The situation was even more serious, as it emerged that we were targeted by this intrusion.”

She said that personal data of citizens was intercepted indiscriminately. Corporate information, often of high economic and even strategic value, was at the centre of espionage activity.

At the same time, Brazilian diplomatic missions, among them the Permanent Mission to the United Nations and the president’s office, had their communications intercepted, she charged.

Rousseff unleashed her attack even as U.S. President Barack Obama was awaiting his turn to address the General Assembly on the opening day of the annual high-level debate, which concludes Oct. 4.

By longstanding tradition, Brazil is the first speaker, followed by the United States.

Even though Obama had the right of reply, he did not address the issues raised by Rousseff, who also cancelled a proposed official visit to the White House last week protesting the electronic surveillance of her country.

“We have let the U.S. government know our disapproval, and demanded explanations, apologies and guarantees that such procedures will never be repeated,” she said.

According to documents released by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden, the illegal electronic surveillance of Brazil was conducted by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

There has been considerable speculation that Brazil may initiate a General Assembly resolution condemning surveillance of member states by outside intelligence agencies. If it is brought before the Assembly, the United States and its Western allies may oppose it.

There have been reports that the NSA had also conducted similar surveillance of European countries and also the office of the European Union located in the U.N. neighbourhood.

Rousseff called on the United Nations to play a leading role in the effort to regulate the conduct of member states with regard to these technologies and the importance of the internet and social networks as a way to build democracy worldwide.

She said Brazil will present proposals for the establishment of a civilian multilateral framework for the governance and use of the Internet and to ensure the effective protection of data that travels through the web.

The Germany-based Der Spiegel magazine reported last month that NSA technicians have managed to decrypt the U.N.’s internal video teleconferencing (VTC) system, as part of its surveillance of the world body.

The combination of this new access to the U.N. and the cracked encryption code have led to “a dramatic improvement in VTC data quality and (the) ability to decrypt the VTC traffic,” the NSA agents reportedly said.

In the article, titled “How America Spies on Europe and the U.N.”, Spiegel said that in just under three weeks, the number of decrypted communications increased from 12 to 458.

Rousseff said she was publicly taking up the issue of surveillance because it was a matter of great importance and gravity.

Tampering in such a manner in the affairs of other countries is a breach of international law and is an affront to the principles that must guide the relations among them, especially among friendly nations, she added.

“A sovereign nation can never establish itself to the detriment of another sovereign nation,” she said.

The right to safety of citizens of one country can never be guaranteed by violating the fundamental human and civil rights of another country’s citizens, she added.

And it’s even worse when private sector companies participate in this type of spying activity, she said.

Responding to the U.S. argument that any surveillance outside the United States was aimed only at monitoring terrorist activities, she said, “Brazil knows how to protect itself. We reject, fight and do not harbour terrorist groups.”

While the U.S. and Iranian heads of state have yet to meet, the 68^th session of the United Nations General Assembly may mark a new era between the two countries.

After more than 30 years of frozen US-Iran relations, President Barack Obama announced Tuesday during his address to the world body that Secretary of State John Kerry would be directly involved in talks over Iran’s nuclear programme.“As Javad [Zarif] has said, now is the time to stop behaving like carpet merchants." -- William Luers of the Iran Project

Obama’s announcement comes on the heels of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s decision earlier this month to move Iran’s nuclear negotiating file from the Supreme National Security Council to its Foreign Ministry headed by Kerry’s counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif.

Kerry and Zarif are scheduled to meet on Thursday, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton announced on Monday, adding that Zarif and the P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, China and Russia plus Germany) would meet in Geneva in October.

The Kerry-Zarif meeting would be the highest-level formal encounter of the two countries since the 1979 U.N. General Assembly when then Secretary of State Cyrus Vance met with Provisional Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi seven months after the Islamic Revolution, according to Columbia University Professor Gary Sick.

“It’s very important if what Obama said meant that Kerry will be negotiating with Zarif directly and permanently,” Iran expert Trita Parsi told IPS.

“The U.S. would then be investing more in the diplomatic process, which means more political will and a greater cost of failure, and that is exactly what we need to overcome the political obstacles,” said the president of the National Iranian American Council.

The “mistrust” between the U.S. and Iran “has deep roots”, Obama said before acknowledging the U.S. role in “overthrowing an Iranian government” as part of U.S. “interference” in Iranian affairs.

Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, addresses the general debate of the sixty-eighth session of the General Assembly. Credit: UN Photo/Sarah Fretwell

He went on to cite some of Washington’s own grievances, including the 1979 Iranian takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and Iran threatening Israel “with destruction”.

But in a speech that emphasised the importance of pursuing diplomacy before resorting to force in securing U.S. interests, Obama’s message on Iran was clear.

“We should be able to achieve a resolution that respects the rights of the Iranian people, while giving the world confidence that the Iranian programme is peaceful,” he said.

“The fascinating thing is that he’s talking to multiple audiences and re-explaining to Americans why negotiating with Iran is the way to go,” Heather Hurlburt, a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, told IPS.

“We are not seeking regime change and we respect the right of the Iranian people to access peaceful nuclear energy.  Instead, we insist that the Iranian government meet its responsibilities under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and U.N. Security Council resolutions,” said Obama.

“He’s signaling to Iran that we’re prepared for mutual rights and mutual respect at a moment when the Iranians seem more ready to hear that than in past and he’s signaling how we see that piece of the puzzle fitting in with other regional issues,” noted Hurlburt, who heads the DC-based National Security Network.

While Zarif listened to Obama’s morning address in the General Assembly auditorium, no U.S. delegate was visible during Rouhani’s afternoon speech.

For Iran’s part, Rouhani did not attend a lunch hosted by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at which Obama was present. Iran also reportedly rejected a U.S. offer for an encounter earlier in the day.

But some experts suggest that too much attention has been placed on an Obama-Rouhani meeting.

“Expectations are already high on both sides but if nothing concrete is ready, a meeting without something solid would be damaging for each president,” William Luers, a former senior U.S. official and ambassador, told IPS in an email.

“As Javad [Zarif] has said, now is the time to stop behaving like ‘carpet merchants’,” said the director of the prominent Iran Project.

“Zarif and Kerry are as good a pair as we could ask for to find out whether diplomacy can succeed. We all believe it can. The handshakes can wait,” he said.

“The important development is that both sides appear to be serious at pursuing direct talks at a high level, and the important issue is whether those talks will make substantive progress,” international relations expert Stephen Walt told IPS.

“A brief meeting between Obama and Rouhani would have been stagecraft, but not statecraft,” said the Harvard Kennedy Professor.

During his speech, Iran’s president spoke strongly against foreign military intervention in the Middle East, particularly in Syria, and against the rounds of sanctions that have been imposed on Iran.

“Unjust sanctions, as manifestation of structural violence, are intrinsically inhumane and against peace. And contrary to the claims of those who pursue and impose them, it is not the states and the political elite that are targeted, but rather, it is the common people who are victimised,” he said.

“Rouhani had the delicate task of delivering a speech that addresses multiple audiences, and the first part of his speech, especially the part about the sanctions, was addressing a domestic hardline audience,” Yasmin Alem, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told IPS.

“The second part was about Iran’s commitment to constructive dialogue and its willingness to negotiate and reach a settlement,” said the Iran expert.

“Iran seeks constructive engagement with other countries based on mutual respect and common interest, and within the same framework does not seek to increase tensions with the United States,” said the Iranian president, adding that he “listened carefully” to Obama’s speech.

“Commensurate with the political will of the leadership in the United States and hoping that they will refrain from following the short-sighted interest of warmongering pressure groups, we can arrive at a framework to manage our differences,” said the recently elected centrist cleric, who served as a nuclear negotiator under reformist president Mohammad Khatami.

“It was interesting to hear him to talk about how we can ‘manage’ relations,” Alem told IPS.

“Iran is still a long way from establishing normal relations with the U.S. and this echoes Obama’s words this morning in saying all that is down the road,” said Alem.

“It’s a good sign that both leaders are clear about the situation and on the same page,” she said.

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, accused of war crimes and genocide in the politically-troubled Darfur region, is apparently planning to visit New York and address the U.N. General Assembly next week.

The proposed visit has triggered outrage among human rights groups and has been rebuffed by the United States."The last thing the U.N. needs is a visit by an ICC fugitive.” - HRW's Elise Keppler

The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague “invited the competent U.S. authorities to arrest Omar al-Bashir and surrender him to the Court, in the event he enters their territory.”

The ICC reminded the United States of the two outstanding arrest warrants issued on Mar. 4, 2009 and July 12, 2010 against al-Bashir for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

On Mar. 6, 2009 and Jul. 21, 2010, the ICC Registry transmitted requests for al-Bashir’s arrest and surrender to all U.N. Security Council members that are not states parties to the Rome Statue, including the United States.

The Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC), a global network of civilsociety organisations working to strengthen international cooperation with the ICC, said it is “seriously concerned” by reports that al-Bashir has applied for a visa to attend the 68th session of the General Assembly which begins next Tuesday.

The speakers on opening day include U.S. President Barack Obama.

Al-Bashir is not on the official list released by the United Nations, which is expected to update it to reflect changes, if any.

A Third World diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS that to the best of his knowledge, the United States cannot refuse a visa to a visiting head of government or a visiting delegation because the U.S.-U.N. headquarters agreement calls for the facilitation of delegates participating in U.N. meetings in New York.

Sudanese President Omer Hassan A. al-Bashir at United Nations Headquarters in New York in 2006. Credit: UN Photo/Erin Siegal

William Pace, convenor of the CICC, said while the 1947 U.N. Headquarters Agreement requires the U.S. government to cooperate in the attendance of representatives of governments, the U.S. government did assist in the transfer of fugitive Bosco Ntaganda from the Democratic Republic of Congo to the ICC in The Hague earlier this year.

Asked for a clarification, U.N. Associate Spokesperson Farhan Haq told IPS, “The question of whether the United States is to grant President al-Bashir a visa to allow him to attend the General Debate [of the General Assembly] is, first and foremost, a matter for the United States to determine, consistent with the applicable rules of international law.”

He acknowledged that al-Bashir is subject to an arrest warrant issued by the ICC. “The secretary-general would therefore urge him to cooperate fully with the ICC, consistent with Security Council resolution 1593 (2005), by surrendering himself to the ICC,” Haq said.

Pace said, “If al-Bashir comes to the U.N., the Coalition will monitor very closely that U.N. officials and governments respect the principles of ‘non-essential contact’ with persons subject to international arrest warrants for the worst crimes against humanity.”

Asked about the proposed visit, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Powers told reporters she had seen published reports that al-Bashir intends to travel to New York.

“President al-Bashir, as you know, stands accused of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity by the ICC,” she said. Such a trip “would be deplorable, cynical and hugely inappropriate”.

“We would suggest that given that he is under those charges, and that the ICC has indicted him, again, on genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity charges, that it would be more appropriate for him to present himself to the ICC and travel to The Hague.”

Jose Luis Diaz, head of the U.N. office of Amnesty International, told IPS, “We’re looking at the different legal issues involved, which are seemingly complex.”

Still, he said, “it would be outrageous for al-Bashir to come to the U.N. to thumb his nose at the international community and essentially mock the victims of the crimes committed in Darfur.”

He said there are two ICC arrest warrants outstanding. And as the president of the Assembly of ICC States Parties said, should al-Bashir transit through a state party on his way to New York, that country has the obligation to arrest and surrender him to the ICC.

“What’s more, Security Council Resolution 1593 (2005) urges all states and concerned regional and other international organisations to cooperate fully with the court, including in sending suspects to The Hague,” said Diaz.

Elise Keppler, associate director of the International Justice Programme at Human Rights Watch, told IPS, “This is an unprecedented situation that raises a range of legal issues. If al-Bashir turns up at the U.N. General Assembly, it will be a brazen challenge to Security Council efforts to promote justice for crimes in Darfur. The last thing the U.N. needs is a visit by an ICC fugitive.”

Notably, a number of states have avoided possible visits by al-Bashir to their countries by encouraging him to send other Sudanese officials and making clear he is not welcome, and also sometimes rescheduling, cancelling or relocating meetings, said Keppler.

Pace said members of the Coalition are exploring all legal measures that could be taken by the U.N., the ICC states parties and the U.S. government to secure the arrest and transfer of President al-Bashir to the ICC.

The Coalition will also assist in organising political protests if al-Bashir attends the U.N. General Assembly, he added.

Every nation in the world has been invited to participate at the highest political level in the High-Level Meeting of the General Assembly on Nuclear Disarmament scheduled for Sep. 26. This has never happened before. We have never been at such a moment of crisis and opportunity.

The crisis arises because the rational route forward which has been identified by the vast majority of the world’s countries in support of advancing a convention banning nuclear weapons or, as the secretary general has also suggested, a framework of legal agreements achieving elimination, has not been supported by the U.S. or Russia, two states with more than 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons.

Thus, progress toward disarmament lacks the galvanising focus preliminary negotiations on a treaty would provide. It is also a moment of opportunity since except for India and Pakistan, no states with nuclear weapons are actually hostile to one another.

Rhetorical puffery has become expected in season after season while regularly a new crisis du jour sweeps attention away from nuclear disarmament obligations. Anyone can see cynicism as a dangerous and contagious problem looming on the horizon if nothing meaningful is done soon.

Many countries know this and that is why the 67th session of the General Assembly Resolution A/RES/67/39 moved to convene this high-level meeting on nuclear disarmament for the 68th session of the General Assembly next week.

China and India have both expressed support for negotiating a universal ban on the weapons and Pakistan has stated it would follow. France, the U.S. and UK, and Russia openly oppose progress now on even taking preliminary steps to negotiate a legal ban.

Claims are made that progress through the START process and obtaining incremental steps such as entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban and a treaty banning the further production of weapons grade fissile materials must be achieved and focused upon to the exclusion of other efforts. Diplomats from nuclear weapons states even assert that advocacy for a universal, non-discriminatory ban would divert attention and diminish effectiveness in pursuing incremental steps.

The problems with only taking this incremental approach are many. The U.S. Senate is unlikely in the near term to ratify the test ban. The case for the test ban as part of the march toward disarmament has not been made domestically and thus its advocacy appears as incoherent.

It is hard to make the case that the U.S. military should ever be constrained without demonstrating the benefits of obtaining a universal ban on the weapons. Incoherence in advocacy leads to policies going in multiple directions. An example of such incoherence was obvious in the policy for ratification for the START treaty – support the treaty and pledge hundreds of billions of dollars to “modernise” the arsenal and infrastructure.

The negotiations for the fissile materials cut off treaty are being done in the Conference on Disarmament, a body of 61 nations in Geneva that operates by consensus. Thus, one country can always stop progress. This body has not even had a working agenda in over a decade. Spoilers abound. Progress will not take place there.

Third, reliance on progress on the bilateral leadership of Russia and the U.S. is foolish. Russia has made clear that the next round on START reductions will not happen without resolution of differences on the dangers of global precision strike aspirations of the U.S. military where nuclear warheads are replaced by conventional warheads and new weapons fulfill old missions, missile defense as a possible sword and shield should technical breakthroughs arise, and weaponisation of space, a course Russia wants prohibited by treaty.

These issues will not be resolved soon since behind them all is a cadre within the U.S. military which wants to always have a dominant position for security purposes. Progress is unlikely while Russia feels threatened.

Yet: Consensus with Russia and the U.S. that through a universal treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention, progress in Syria can be made thus making us all safer bodes well for progress on banning nuclear weapons. Surely no one would claim nuclear weapons are any less abhorrent and more legitimate to use than chemical weapons.

Yet: Imagine if the 114 leaders of governments in the five nuclear weapons-free zones of Latin America, Africa, South Asia, Central Asia and the South Pacific each said, “My country benefits from being in a nuclear weapons-free zone and remains threatened by those countries with nuclear weapons. It is time we made the entire world a nuclear weapons-free zone.”

The necessary upgrading of the issue to the prominent position it deserves would happen.

Imagine if the statement from the gathering said, “We will dedicate a high level day each year until the threat of nuclear weapons is gone.” Imagine if commencement of preliminary negotiations were committed to happen by a critical mass of leaders “in the Conference on Disarmament, or any other appropriate and effective venue at the earliest possible time, and we commit to full participation in this process.”

Such a call for progress would be an irresistible stimulant. But what would really ring a bell for progress would be a statement along these lines:

“There are global common public goods which must be obtained to make us all safer. Cooperation in addressing terrorism, cyber security, stable financial markets, and peaceful democratisation in countries in transition are of high value and critical importance. The very survival of civilisation depends on how well we work together in obtaining other global common goods – protecting the climate, the oceans, the rainforests, all living systems upon which humanity depends.

“There is an existential imperative that we cooperate in new dynamic ways to meet these new challenges. Nothing could compel us more strongly to resolve our differences in a spirit of peace and common purpose. Even thinking of seriously stating what is common and good for us all makes clear that possessing and threatening to use nuclear weapons is irrational, dysfunctional and must end, now.

“We breathe the same air and it is either cleansed with a spirit of cooperation or befouled by fear and threat. We are resolved to succeed in spirit of cooperation for this and future generations. That spirit calls us to denounce and renounce nuclear weapons for all now.”

Jonathan Granoff is President of the Global Security Institute, and Adjunct Professor of International Law at Widener University School of Law.

Vehicles of the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) roll past during a ceremony marking the transition of Force Commanders in the Golan Heights, 2010. Credit: UN Photo/Arnold Felfer

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 18 2013 (IPS)

On the eve of the 68^th session of the United Nations General Assembly, a newly released survey of 39 countries shows that the world body remains relatively popular around the globe.

According to the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project (GAP), clear majorities of respondents in 22 of the surveyed countries said they hold a favourable view of the U.N., as did pluralities in an additional six countries.

The median positive rating for the U.N. across the 39 countries was 58 percent, compared to 27 percent with negative views.

The survey also found that view of the world body tended to be significantly more favourable among younger adults than older respondents in about half of the countries that were polled. The generational differences were most pronounced in the U.S., Canada, and Turkey.

The same held true with respect to educational level. More highly educated respondents were significantly more positive about the U.N. than less-educated respondents, particularly in Turkey, Japan, Pakistan, and Canada, according to GAP.

Surprisingly, men tended to have more favourable views of the U.N. than women in a number of countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia, but also in Brazil and Pakistan, according to Bruce Stokes, a top GAP analyst.

He noted that women in these countries were also more likely to decline to answer the question on the grounds that they “don’t know”. In Pakistan, for example, nearly 80 percent of women answered “don’t know” to the question; in Uganda, 42 percent declined to answer for that reason.

“There’s no way to know why that is,” Stokes told IPS. “It may be that they indeed are less likely to know more about the U.N. [than their male counterparts], but it suggests that the U.N. may have a problem with women in these countries.”

Positive feelings toward the world body, which will see a cascade of world leaders addressing the General Assembly over the next two weeks, are strongest in East and Southeast Asia, followed by sub-Saharan Africa, according to GAP, which conducted its latest in its annual series of global surveys between March and May this year.

However, a 45-percent plurality of respondents in China – one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and the only one from Asia – recorded an unfavourable view of the U.N., while only 39 percent had a positive impression overall. Four years ago, the view was substantially more favourable: 55 percent of respondents held a positive view, while only 32 percent said they had a negative impression.

And in Japan, favourable views only slightly outnumbered unfavourable ones – by a 45-to-40 percent margin. The differential only two years ago was 61-27 percent.

The region with by far the most negative opinion of the U.N., however, was the Greater Middle East. Israel recorded the highest percentage of respondents who said they had unfavourable views of the U.N. – 70 percent. That climbed to 75 percent among Jewish Israelis.

But residents of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza strip were almost as negative – 69 percent overall said they had unfavourable views of the world body, as did majorities in Jordan (61 percent), Turkey (56 percent), Egypt (52 percent), and Pakistan, where a plurality described their views as unfavourable, and 62 percent declined to answer the question or said they didn’t know.

“It’s not because the public doesn’t like the objectives of the U.N. or its purpose.” noted Steven Kull of the University of Maryland’s Programme on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and worldpublicopinion.org, about the negative views in the predominantly Muslim countries of the region.

“They think it’s not living up to that purpose, and, as an example, they point to the failure to follow through on U.N. Security Council resolutions 224 and 338 [to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict] in promoting international justice,” according to Kull, who has designed and overseen a number of in-depth surveys and analyses on international public opinion.

“And they see the U.S. as able to corral the U.N. Security Council into serving its ends.”

Nearly 38,000 people in the 39 countries took part in the survey, a massive undertaking that included in-depth interviews on scores of questions, the specific results of which have been and will continue to be released by GAP over a period of months.

In Asia, South Korea, home to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, was the most favourable of all 39 countries. Eighty-four percent of its respondents reported a positive view. It was followed closely by 82 percent favourable responses in both Indonesia and the Philippines.

Compared to the 2007 GAP results, the latest poll showed significant increases in favourable opinions in Argentina (+11 percent), and both South Korea and the U.S. (+10 percent). On the other hand, the greatest declines in favourable opinions were found in both China and Spain (-13 percent), Ghana and Kenya (-12 percent), Israel (-11 percent), and Mexico (-9 percent).

Kull noted that the implications of such a survey are not easy to assess, in part because it’s not clear whether the respondents is referring to the “ideal” of an institution like the U.N. or its actual performance.

“There’s frustration that the institution isn’t working as many people think it should, and that creates a negative feeling,” he told IPS.

“But there’s really no place in the world where you don’t find a majority of people who think that it’s a good idea to have a multilateral institution to further international law and cooperation.

“Overall,” he said of the latest results, “it’s still a pretty solid foundation of support, given the frustration over its performance.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

The U.N. General Assembly Hall. Credit: UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 13 2013 (IPS)

The upcoming event at the United Nations is being billed as something politically unique.

For the first time in its 68-year history, the 193-member General Assembly is holding a high-level meeting of world leaders on one of the most controversial issues of our time: nuclear disarmament."While the mirage of a nuclear weapon-free world is held aloft, the CTBT has not entered into force." -- Jayantha Dhanapala, former U.N. under-secretary-general for disarmament affairs

But expectations for the meeting are low, says Jayantha Dhanapala, a former U.N. under-secretary-general for disarmament affairs.

Unless disarmament becomes a priority for possessor states, he told IPS, speeches and meetings alone are not going to change the stark dangers posed by this most destructive weapon of mass destruction (WMD).

“A decision to outlaw nuclear weapons in the same way as biological and chemical weapons is essential,” said Dhanapala, who is president of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, which jointly won the 1995 Nobel Peace prize for their efforts at nuclear disarmament.

“The time to start negotiations on a Nuclear Weapon Convention (NWC) is not tomorrow but now,” he said.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who has consistently maintained that nuclear disarmament is one of his top priorities, is expected to call for “a world free of nuclear weapons” at the meeting scheduled to take place at the United Nations on Sep. 26.

Asked if the high-level meeting will be another exercise in futility, Alyn Ware, a member of the World Future Council and consultant to the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms, told IPS, “It could be an exercise in futility if governments, including the non-nuclear governments, do not treat it seriously.”

He said non-nuclear governments should participate at the highest level, and make strong statements that they are more secure without nuclear weapons and that the security of all in the 21st Century requires the abolition of nuclear weapons, meaning that it is a “global good of the highest order”.

Ware said they should also pledge to dedicate greater resources and political traction to developing the building blocks for a nuclear weapons-free world through the Open Ended Working Group (OEWG) to which the nuclear weapons states (NWS) have an obligation to join.

Currently, there are five declared nuclear weapon states, namely the United States, Britain, Russia, France, China, all five permanent members of the Security Council (P5), along with three undeclared nuclear weapon states, India, Pakistan, Israel.

Despite its three nuclear tests, North Korea still remains in limbo.

The three undeclared nuclear powers have all refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), as against the five declared nuclear powers who are states parties to the treaty.

Dhanapala said nine countries – five within the NPT and four outside – possess a total inventory of 17,270 nuclear warheads today, 4,400 of them placed on missiles or located on bases ready to be launched in minutes.

The U.S. and Russia alone own 16,200 of these warheads, he pointed out.

And despite the lingering horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the risks of nuclear weapons being used again – by design or accident, by states or non-state actors – are huge, he added.

“The results would be catastrophic for all humankind,” Dhanapala warned.

Ware told IPS the role of nuclear weapons could be reduced in Northeast Asia through negotiations for a North East Asian Nuclear Weapon Free Zone.

The U.S., he said, could exercise more effective diplomacy in the Middle East to move the Arab states and Israel to participate in good faith in the proposed U.N. Conference on a Middle East Zone Free from Nuclear Weapons and Other Weapons of Mass Destruction. Arab States are demanding preconditions that are unacceptable to Israel, so both need to exercise some flexibility, he noted.

Non-nuclear countries could use the OEWG, as long as the mandate is renewed, to commence preparatory work on the building blocks for a nuclear weapons-free world (based on the Model Nuclear Weapons Convention circulated by the secretary-general) regardless of whether or not the nuclear weapons states join the OEWG in the near future.

Dhanapala told IPS the first Special Session of the General Assembly Devoted to Disarmament (SSODI) was held in 1978 as a direct outcome of the summit of world leaders of the 1976 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) held in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

It was a period of detente in the Cold War and a far-reaching Final Declaration was adopted.

No multilateral gathering has matched that remarkable consensus on fundamental concepts achieved 35 years ago, especially on the priority of nuclear disarmament, he added.

“Yet today, the multilateral disarmament machinery established by SSOD I is in grave disarray,” he said.

The sole multilateral negotiating body, the Conference on Disarmament, has neither negotiated treaties nor even adopted a programme of work since 1996, according to Dhanapala.

The Disarmament Commission has met ritualistically every year without any agreed texts in the last 14 years.

And the U.N.’s First Committee, dealing with disarmament, is still churning out resolutions with little impact, he added.

“While the mirage of a nuclear weapon-free world is held aloft, the CTBT has not entered into force, the promised conference on the Middle East as a WMD-free zone has not been held and bilateral U.S.-Russian nuclear disarmament talks have not even started,” Dhanapala said.
The need for a radical change has been recognised by the countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and their supporters have resisted NAM demands for a SSOD IV.

A one-day high-level meeting of the General Assembly is a compromise, he said.

The 2010 NPT Review Conference with its 64-point action programme and the increasing recognition of humanitarian disarmament are an inadequate basis for the non-nuclear weapon states, most of which are in legally recognised nuclear weapon-free zones, to trust the nuclear armed states to disarm.

The Sep. 26 meeting must be the beginning of a nuclear disarmament process, Dhanapala said.

A street fight in Cairo over ousted Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi. Credit: Hisham Allam/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 6 2013 (IPS)

Against the backdrop of widespread sectarian violence in Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt and Syria – and rising xenophobia and Islamophobia in Western Europe and the United States – the United Nations hosted its second high-level forum on the “culture of peace”.

One of the key questions before delegates Friday was particularly timely: is the U.N.’s message on culture of peace failing to get across to countries steeped in violence and civil wars?"The magnitude of these problems requires all human beings to work together in finding new, workable, realistic solutions." -- Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury of Bangladesh

Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury of Bangladesh, special guest at the high-level forum and chair of the General Assembly’s drafting committee for the U.N. Declaration and Programme of Action (PoA) on Culture of Peace (1998-99), told IPS, “My own perception and experience will not let me say that the U.N.’s message on the culture of peace is failing to get across.”

Civil society worldwide has been in the forefront of the global movement for the culture of peace, working diligently and patiently at the grassroots level, he said.

“I find it is the governments and power structures which are the most persistent foot-draggers with regard to advancing the culture of peace through policy steps and action,” said Chowdhury, a former U.N. under-secretary-general and currently representing civil society and the Global Movement for the Culture of Peace.

The agenda of the high-level forum included a panel discussion on “The role of interfaith cooperation in promoting a global culture of peace”, and “The culture of peace as the agenda for a new global civilisation: Where are we now?”

Convened by the current president of the General Assembly, Vuk Jeremic, the forum focused specifically on the implementation of the PoA adopted by the General Assembly in September 1999.

The PoA identified eight specific areas of action at all levels, including education; sustainable economic and social development; human rights; equality; democratic participation; understanding, tolerance and solidarity; communication and the free flow of information and knowledge; international peace and security.

Addressing delegates, Jeremic said member states rightly chose to put education first on the list, inspired in no small measure by what India’s Mahatma Gandhi had enjoined three quarters of a century ago, that “if we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.”

To effectively meet the challenges of the 21st century, Jeremic said, “I believe the generations to come should be instilled with the ethics of non-violence, and equipped with the right tools to flourish as adults – as future parents, responsible community leaders, and engaged citizens.”

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, one of the strongest proponents of the culture of peace, has repeatedly said today’s culture of violence should be replaced by a culture of peace.

He said people intuitively understand there can be no military solution to conflicts and that the world’s scarce resources should be spent to help people flourish, not to fund weapons that cause more suffering.

“But too many decision makers do not get this simple logic,” he added.

The world spends almost twice as much on weapons in one day than the United Nations spends for its global mission of peace, human rights and development in one year, Ban pointed out.

He said about 1.7 trillion dollars was spent on weapons in 2011 alone.

That is an enormous cost to people who go to bed hungry, children who die because they lack clean water, and farmers who cannot till land because it is rendered unusable by land mines, he added.

“Economists call this an opportunity cost. I call it a moral outrage,” Ban said.

Asked about the widespread sectarian strife, Chowdhury told IPS, “Most disturbing to me is that today’s atrocities often are directed to people living in the same community or neighbourhood.”

Hatred and intolerance have blurred the vision of the perpetrators. Great differences still exist between peoples and regions, and the world is experiencing a new era of insecurity and uncertainty, he added.

The United Nations, he pointed out, has shown great vision by adopting its historic, norm-setting Declaration and PoA on the Culture of Peace in 1999, but has not been organised enough in making the document a system-wide flagship effort of the world body.

“I am a believer that the world, particularly the governments, will come to realise its true value and usefulness sooner than later,” Chowdhury said.

Asked how much of the PoA has been implemented, Chowdhury said it is an agreement among nations, governments, civil society, media and individuals – all of them identified in this document as key actors.

Identifying eight specific areas, it encourages actions at all levels the individual, the family, the community, the nation, the region and, of course, the global level.

The PoA does not have a time-bound structure, he said.

“It was intentionally done that way as we, the drafters, realised that the challenges to sustainable peace will mutate and our constant vigilance in advancing the culture of peace will be needed,” he added.

The interdependency of today’s world, if not addressed with sanity, he said, can turn into a social, economic, nuclear or environmental catastrophe.

“The magnitude of these problems requires all human beings to work together in finding new, workable, realistic solutions,” Chowdhury said.

And the values of non-violence, tolerance and democracy which augment the flourishing of the culture of peace will generate the mindset that is a prerequisite for the transition from force to reason, from conflict and violence to dialogue and peace, he said.

“This I have seen first hand as my work took me to the farthest corners of the world,” he noted. “What I have seen has outraged me but also has given me hope and encouragement that there are forces who are determined to turn our planet into a livable place for all and where human dignity has taken strong roots.”

A group of about 20 “eminent persons” is to be tasked with an unenviable job: convince eight recalcitrant countries to join the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

The eight holdouts – China, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and the United States – have not given any indication of possible ratifications, leaving the treaty in limbo."The vast majority of the states recognise the immense political impact of the treaty's entry into force." -- Hirotsugu Terasaki of Soka Gakkai International

Under the provisions of the CTBT, the treaty cannot enter into force without the participation of the last of the eight key countries.

“We are working hard day-in and day-out to make the treaty into law,” Lassina Zerbo, executive secretary of the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO), told reporters Wednesday.

He urged non-signatories to understand that ratification would enhance not only international security, but their own national security as well.

Zerbo said the proposed group, comprising former prime ministers and other highly regarded figures from both states parties and non-signatory states, will be launched during the eighth Conference on Facilitating the Entry into Force of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. The conference is scheduled to take place in New York on Sep. 27.

Providing an update on the treaty’s current status, Zerbo said 183 countries had signed, of which 159 had already ratified it.

But in accordance with its Article XIV, the treaty will enter into force after all 44 states, including the missing eight, listed in its Annex 2 have ratified it.

With the General Assembly belatedly commemorating the annual International Day Against Nuclear Tests Thursday, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon lamented the fact that the CTBT has still not entered into force, even though 20 years have passed since the Conference on Disarmament began negotiations on the treaty.

The International Day Against Nuclear Tests was commemorated worldwide on Aug. 29 but the General Assembly meeting took place Thursday.

In a message to the Assembly, Ban said with the adoption of the Partial Test Ban Treaty 50 years ago, the international community completed its first step towards ending nuclear-weapon-test explosions for all time.

“This objective remains a serious matter of unfinished business on the disarmament agenda,” he said.

Urging all states to sign and ratify CTBT without further delay, Ban singled out the eight holdouts as having a special responsibility.

“None should wait for others to act first,” he implored. “In the meantime, all states should maintain or implement moratoria on nuclear explosions.”

John Loretz, programme director at International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, told IPS the moratorium has been honoured by most of the nuclear-weapon states since the 1990s. The exceptions, he said, have been India and Pakistan, both of whom tested nuclear weapons in 1998, but have not done so since then, and North Korea, which has conducted three very small tests since 2006.

When Pyongyang conducted its third test last February, the 15-member U.N. Security Council condemned the test as “a grave violation” of its previous resolutions and described North Korea as a country which is “a clear threat to international peace and security”.

Hirotsugu Terasaki, executive director of the Office of Peace Affairs of the Tokyo-based Soka Gakkai International (SGI), which has long campaigned for the abolition of all nuclear weapons, told IPS he would like to pay special attention to the efforts of the Preparatory Commission for the CTBTO which has played an important role in preventing and prohibiting nuclear test explosions.

Since North Korea’s first nuclear tests in 2006, 23 countries have ratified the CTBT, he noted. “And nearly 95 percent of the world ratifying the CTBT implies that the vast majority of the states recognise the immense political impact of the treaty’s entry into force.”

Following their nuclear tests in 1998, both India and Pakistan announced their decision to extend the moratorium of nuclear testing. In this sense, he pointed out, the CTBT has had a major positive impact on the prevention of nuclear testing.

“The international community sees the CTBT as a positive step,” Terasaki added.

Asked what remains to be done, Terasaki told IPS the key to bringing the CTBT into force is its ratification by the U.S. and China.

The United States revealed that Z machine plutonium trials were conducted between April and June this year at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico to assess the working order of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Despite this, President Barack Obama’s June address in Berlin renewed his commitment to U.S. ratification of the CTBT.

“This statement is important and welcomed but will require serious follow-through to win the support of the U.S. Senate,” he added.

The Obama administration will need the strong support of the international community. And the role of civil society is indispensable in putting pressure on the U.S. policy-makers to deliver on their commitments, Terasaki said.

Also, on Aug. 7, he said, Zerbo met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi during his trip to China. Wang stressed China’s continued commitment to the CTBT and reconfirmed the importance of the early ratification of CTBT.

Zerbo stated that there is a strong case for China to demonstrate leadership and pave the way for the remaining eight countries to ratify the CTBT.

The international community must work together to support China in overcoming the various technical and political barriers that stand in the way of the treaty’s ratification, Terasaki added.

Homosexuality is broadly accepted in North America, the EU and much of Latin America, but widely rejected in predominantly Muslim nations and Africa, as well as in parts of Asia and Russia. Credit: Bigstock

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 4 2013 (IPS)

The 193-member U.N. General Assembly (UNGA), in its supreme wisdom, has declared over 100 commemorative “days” dedicated to peacekeepers, refugees, children, migrants, girl children, rural women and indigenous people, among others.

And then there is also World Water Day, an International Day of Happiness, a World Day for Social Justice, World Tourism Day, International Day for Biodiversity and an International Day for Elimination of Racial Discrimination."The international level... frankly has been one of the last bastions of acceptable bias and intolerance in matters of sexual orientation and gender identity." -- Amnesty International's Jose Luis Diaz

The U.N.’s calendar of “international days” each month is virtually bursting at its seams.

But the General Assembly, which is sharply divided over the politically sensitive issue of gay and lesbian rights, has side-stepped a decision to declare an International Day dedicated to lesbians, gays, bisexuals and the transgender (LGBT) community.

Still, the New York Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the Joint U.N. Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) hosted a press conference last month to commemorate an International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO).

But there were no system-wide commemorative meetings at the United Nations because, for all intents and purposes, IDAHO was a low-profile event since it did not have the blessings of the General Assembly, the U.N.’s highest policy-making body.

Homosexuality is broadly accepted in North America, the European Union and much of Latin America, but widely rejected in predominantly Muslim nations and Africa, as well as in parts of Asia and Russia, according to a survey of 39 countries by the Pew Research Center.

The results of the survey, released Tuesday, also mirror the political division at the United Nations over gay and lesbian rights.

Charles Radcliffe, chief of the Global Issues Section at OHCHR, told IPS, “There has been no attempt to date to introduce a resolution designating 17 May as the International Day Against Homophobia.”

In total, he said, the United Nations and its agencies officially observe nearly 120 “international days” — in almost all cases these flow from UNGA resolutions or, in a few cases, decisions taken at an agency level through their governing boards.

Boris O. Dittrich, advocacy director of the LGBT programme at Human Rights Watch (HRW), told IPS the High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay gave a speech in The Hague where she remarked that the U.N. observes many “special days”, but not IDAHO.

She would like to see this changed, but in the United Nations one needs a majority vote.

Dittrich said HRW would support an initiative to celebrate IDAHO officially. “It is a great advocacy hook,” he added.

In many countries, he said, activists organise activities and there is some media attention for discrimination issues based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Meanwhile, the 19-member U.N. Committee on Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), which recommends consultative status to gay and lesbian groups, has repeatedly rejected applications from these groups over the last few years.

In what was described as “a historic vote”, the Committee last week recommended special consultative status to the Lesbian Medical Association (LMA). The Australia-based organisation advances both lesbian health professionals’ visibility and lesbian health in general.

The representative of Bulgaria told the committee that the organisation had faced postponement for seven consecutive sessions and had answered 54 questions posed to it over the years. The Committee was systematically deterring its application. It was time, she stated, to take a decision.

The Committee then recommended consultative status to the LMA by a vote 10 in favour (Belgium, Bulgaria, Burundi, India, Israel, Nicaragua, Peru, Turkey, the United States and Venezuela) to six against (China, Morocco, Pakistan, Russia, Senegal and Sudan), with two abstentions (Kyrgyzstan and Mozambique).

Cuba, another committee member, was absent during voting time.

Jose Luis Diaz, Amnesty International’s representative at the United Nations, told IPS, “We heartily welcomed the vote to grant consultative status to the Australian Lesbian Medical Association.”

He said the vote sent a strong message for equality of treatment and non-discrimination, “rights to which we are all entitled without distinction”.

“It was also further evidence that the struggle of the LGBT community for equality is bearing fruit at the international level, which frankly has been one of the last bastions of acceptable bias and intolerance in matters of sexual orientation and gender identity,” he added.

And in another encouraging step, a week after the Australian group got the nod from the U.N.’s NGO committee, an Austrian organisation, Homosexuelle Initiative Wien, also obtained consultative status.

“I hope these two historic votes mean that the day the UNGA can decree without controversy a day against homophobia has drawn nearer,” Luis Diaz added.

Asked about NGO committee’s recommendation, HRW’s Dittrich told IPS, “It was a great day for the NGOs, but it was not unprecedented.” The Dutch LGBT group COC received observer status directly through the NGO Committee in 2008.

“It was a close vote then with only a one vote majority. I remember this very well as HRW lobbied for the COC group,” he noted.

Meanwhile, the Pew survey released Tuesday said the view that homosexuality should be accepted by society is prevalent in most of the EU countries surveyed, with 88 percent in Spain sharing this view.

Outside of Europe, it is accepted by about three-quarters or more: in Canada (80 percent), Australia (79), Argentina (74) and the Philippines (73). A smaller majority (60) believes homosexuality should be accepted in the United States.

In sub-Saharan Africa, at least nine in 10 respondents in Nigeria (98 percent), Senegal (96), Ghana (96), Uganda (96) and Kenya (90) believe homosexuality should not be accepted by society.

Overwhelming majorities in the predominantly Muslim countries surveyed also say homosexuality should be rejected, including 97 percent in Jordan, 95 percent in Egypt, 94 percent in Tunisia and 93 percent in the Palestinian territories.

Anna MacDonald of Control Arms speaks at the start of the ceremony for the signing of the Arms Trade Treaty at United Nations headquarters in New York, Jun. 3, 2013. Credit: Keith Bedford/INSIDER IMAGES (UNITED STATES)

By Lucy Westcott
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 4 2013 (IPS)

The United Nations witnessed a historic moment Monday with the signing of the Arms Trade Treaty, first adopted in April by the General Assembly, and the first time the 85-billion-dollar international arms trade has been regulated by a global set of standards.

Negotiations took place between 193 countries, 63 of which signed on Monday. More countries are expected to sign by the end of the week.“We all know about history, so [the U.S. has] a big responsibility." -- Alex Gálvez of Transitions Foundation of Guatemala

The treaty will regulate all transfers of conventional arms and ban the export of arms if they will be used to commit crimes against humanity.

The treaty also calls for greater transparency and for nations to be held more accountable for their weapons trading. States will undergo rigorous assessment before they move arms overseas and have to provide annual reports on international transfers of weapons.

But some of the world’s major arms importers and exporters, whose inclusion is crucial for the treaty’s success, have abstained or declined to give their signatures. Syria, North Korea and Iran were the only three countries to fully oppose the treaty, while Russia, China and India abstained.

The United States, the world’s largest arms exporter, did not sign, but is expected to by the end of the year. Technicalities in the language of the treaty were the reason for not signing; while U.S. support for the treaty is “strong and genuine,” there were inconsistencies in comparison between the English-language and translated versions of the treaty, said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association.

“All other countries are looking to what the United States does,” Kimball added.

Ray Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, said it is “critical” that the United States sign the treaty, which has been “10 years in the making.”

In a statement released by the State Department Monday morning, Secretary John Kerry welcomed the treaty, ensuring that the U.S.’s signing would not infringe on the fiercely debated Second Amendment rights of U.S. citizens.

“We look forward to signing [the treaty] as soon as the process of conforming the official translations is completed satisfactorily,” Kerry’s statement said.

The treaty is a crucial step towards ending the deaths of the 500,000 people Oxfam estimates perish from armed violence each year.

“The most powerful argument for the [treaty] has always been the call of millions who have suffered armed violence around the world,” Anna Macdonald, head of Arms Control, Oxfam, said in a statement. “Their suffering is the reason we have campaigned for more than a decade,” she added.

When asked if the treaty could prevent atrocities like those which have occurred in Syria, Macdonald said she believed it could, if implemented correctly.

With such vast negotiations taking place, disagreements were bound to arise.

“Items [such as] the scope of weapons covered by the treaty and the strength of human rights provisions preventing arms sales in certain circumstances are not as strong as we would have wished,” Jayantha Dhanapala, president of the Pugwash Conferences on Science & World Affairs and former under secretary general for disarmament affairs, told IPS.

Nevertheless, he believes the treaty is a “long overdue step” in realising Article 26 of the U.N. Charter, which calls for the “establishment of a system for the regulation of armaments”.

And considering the treaty was adopted just weeks ago, 63 signatures is an “excellent number,” Macdonald said.

The treaty will go into force after it receives 50 ratifications from states that have signed. This is expected to take up to two years, but some states, including the United Kingdom, have agreed to already start enforcing the rules of the Treaty.

One victim of gun violence was at the U.N. to witness the signing, the first step on the path to the treaty’s ratification.

Alex Gálvez, 36, was 14 years old when he felt a bullet course through his right shoulder, exiting through his left one. Buying sodas for lunch in Guatemala, Gálvez was caught up in a territorial dispute. The bullet perforated his lungs, but Gálvez said he was too young at the time to realise that he was dying.

Gálvez is now executive director of Transitions Foundation of Guatemala, an organisation that helps Guatemalans living with disabilities, many of whom have been injured by small weapons.

“They left a lot of small weapons without control” after three decades of violence in Guatemala, Gálvez told IPS.

“Unfortunately not everyone had had the opportunity to get treated in time, to get educated [about arms],” Gálvez said. “It’s not just Guatemala that is suffering [from armed violence]; many other countries are suffering too.”

While he received his medical treatment in the United States and understands that it’s a complex process, Gálvez would like to see the country sign, especially as it has provided small arms to many countries, including his own.

“We all know about history, so they have a big responsibility,” Gálvez said.

When the 193-member U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) holds is first-ever high-level meeting on nuclear disarmament next September, there is little or no hope that any of the nuclear powers will make a firm commitment to gradually phase out or abandon their lethal arsenals.

At the beginning of 2013, eight states – UK, the United States, Russia, France, China, India, Pakistan and Israel – possessed approximately 4,400 operational nuclear weapons, according to the latest Yearbook released Monday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)."Our job is to help push the issue of the abolition of nuclear weapons up the political ladder so that they will cooperate on disarmament." -- Jonathan Granoff of the Global Security Institute

Nearly 2,000 of these are kept in a state of high operational alert, SIPRI said.

Jonathan Granoff, president of the Global Security Institute and adjunct professor of International Law at the Widener University School of Law, told IPS, “What is needed to counteract the slow pace in arms control and disarmament is higher political profile.”

For example, he said, if certain leaders were to say at the General Assembly, “My country is one of 114 countries in a nuclear weapons-free zone. We want to help countries relying on nuclear weapons for security to obtain the benefits of helping to make the entire world a nuclear weapons-free zone.”

The SIPRI report highlights the need to bring commitments made solemnly at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference in 2012 to advance nuclear disarmament into action.

Promises must mean something, said Granoff.

If all nuclear warheads are counted, says SIPRI, these eight states together possess a total of approximately 17,265 nuclear weapons, as compared with 19,000 at the beginning of 2012.

The decrease is due mainly to Russia and the United States further reducing their inventories of strategic nuclear weapons under the terms of the Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (New START), as well as retiring ageing and obsolescent weapons.

At the same time, says SIPRI, all five legally recognised nuclear weapons states – China, France, Russia, Britain and the United States – are either deploying new nuclear weapon delivery systems or have announced programmes to do so, and appear determined to retain their nuclear arsenals indefinitely.

Of the five, only China seems to be expanding its nuclear arsenal.

And of the others, India and Pakistan are both expanding their nuclear weapon stockpiles and missile delivery capabilities.

“Once again there was little to inspire hope that the nuclear weapon-possessing states are genuinely willing to give up their nuclear arsenals,” according to SIPRI.

“The long-term modernisation programmes under way in these states suggest that nuclear weapons are still a marker of international status and power,” says Shannon Kile, senior researcher at SIPRI’s Project on Nuclear Arms Control, Disarmament and Non-proliferation.

Asked if the upcoming UNGA disarmament conference will produce anything tangible towards the elimination of nuclear weapons, Kile told IPS that in light of current trends in global nuclear arsenals, the General Assembly cannot be reasonably expected to be able to adopt concrete measures that will require the nuclear weapon-possessing states to begin eliminating these weapons or to change their nuclear force postures and operational practices.

However, the positive role the UNGA can play in terms of strengthening existing norms and political commitments to pursue nuclear disarmament should not be underestimated, Kile said.

This involves, first and foremost, maintaining political pressure on the nuclear weapon-possessing states to reduce the role and salience of nuclear weapons in their national security strategies and defence postures.

This could be done, for example, by persuading these states to adopt explicit declaratory policies ruling out the first-use of nuclear weapons, and to provide legally-binding negative security assurances – that is, guarantees not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states.

In the longer term, he said, the UNGA can contribute to and strengthen efforts to devalue nuclear weapons as a currency of international geopolitics and to delegitimise their possession.

“This will admittedly be a part of a long-term process that will require considerable patience and diplomatic persistence but its normative significance should not be overlooked,” Kile added.

Granoff told IPS the deals the administration of President Barack Obama believed it had to make to get the START Treaty ratified in the U.S. Senate included modernisation of aspects of the nuclear arsenal. Some modernisation simply keeps the weapons in a stable situation while others actually improve accuracy and reliability and could be construed as a form of vertical proliferation, he said.

“Such activities should not be funded, but even if they are, they are not being brought into practice because of military geo strategic planning,” Granoff said.

However, he said, it is not the case that such actions affirm the status of nuclear weapons or a commitment to abrogate pledges under the NPT to move toward a nuclear weapons-free world.

“They only represent short term political deals necessary in an extremely difficult domestic partisan environment to achieve modest arms control measures,” Kile said.

But to say that the policy is not to move in the correct direction is incorrect, he added.

Granoff said there is a new open-ended working group in Geneva that will come up with recommendations.

Norway recently hosted a large conference with many countries highlighting the horrific humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons. These activities bode well for our future, he said.

“It is odd that the P5 (UK, United States, Russia, France and China) did not participate in these activities,” Granoff added. “It shows, however, that they can cooperate and come up with the same strategy and positions when they want.

“Our job is to help push the issue of the abolition of nuclear weapons up the political ladder so that they will cooperate on disarmament,” he said.

Asked about the absence of North Korea from the list of nuclear weapon states, Kile told IPS, “The section of the Yearbook’s nuclear forces chapter dealing with North Korea’s nuclear weapon capabilities notes that it is not known whether North Korea has produced operational (militarily usable) nuclear weapons.”

An operational weapon is not the same as a simple nuclear explosive device and would require more advanced design and engineering skills to build, he said.

“We have published in SIPRI Yearbook 2013 the estimate of six to eight nuclear weapons to indicate the maximum number that North Korea may possess, based on publicly-available information about its plutonium production activities.

“But again, it is unclear whether North Korea has actually produced operational nuclear weapons, so we did not include it in the table in the press release,” he added.

Bashar Ja’afari, Permanent Representative of the Syrian Arab Republic to the UN, addresses the Assembly on May 15. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, May 15 2013 (IPS)

When the 193-member General Assembly voted Wednesday to condemn the beleaguered government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, there was an increase in the number of sceptics who neither supported nor opposed the tottering regime in Damascus.

The resolution, which is legally non-binding, was adopted by a vote of 107-12, compared with 133-12 last August.

As the number of supporters to the resolution declined, from 133 to 107, the abstentions increased significantly, from 31 to 59, including a mix of Asian, African and Latin American countries.

The abstentions included Algeria, Bangladesh, India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, El Salvador, Eritrea, Fiji, Kenya, Lebanon, Myanmar, Singapore, Sudan, South Sudan and Uruguay.

Asked for a response, Jose Luis Diaz, Amnesty International’s U.N. representative in New York, told IPS, “I think the number of abstentions – and the divisions in the General Assembly – are the consequence of political considerations.”

He said some countries would have preferred to give space to a renewed push for negotiations in the wake of the recent agreement between Russia and the United States, including a proposed international conference on Syria.

“They abstained because to vote ‘no’ would have been to side openly with Assad and to ignore the appalling crimes taking place in Syria,” Diaz said.

“All in all,” he said, “I don’t think there’s much disagreement among the vast majority of the General Assembly members – not counting the Syrian government and its supporters, like Russia, China and North Korea – about what is needed in Syria.”

As expected, China and Russia voted against the resolution, as they did in the Security Council when they exercised their vetoes on three Western-sponsored resolutions condemning the Syrian regime and the killing of civilians.

Besides Syria, China and Russia, the countries voting against the resolution included Bolivia, Belarus, Cuba, North Korea, Ecuador, Iran, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.

The resolution, drafted by Qatar and co-sponsored or backed by most of the Arab countries and Western powers, recognised the Syrian National Coalition as “effective representative interlocutors needed for a political transition” in Syria.

Unlike resolutions adopted by the Security Council, General Assembly resolutions are not legally enforceable.

Asked if the resolution will have any impact, Luis Diaz told IPS, “It probably won’t have an immediate impact, but one good thing would be if it builds pressure on the Security Council to take up the issue again and press for binding action.”

Lost in the highly political debate on the resolution text, he said, was the fact that it has the strongest language on accountability of any of the previous General Assembly resolutions on Syria.

Russia, which lobbied last week against the resolution, described it as “very harmful and destructive”.

Russia’s deputy permanent representative Ambassador Alexander Pankin said, “It’s particularly irresponsible and counterproductive to promote this when the United States and Russia reached a very important agreement … and need a unified approach.”

Early this week, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met in Moscow and agreed on a proposed international conference on Syria.

U.S. Deputy Permanent Representative Ambassador Rosemary DiCarlo told delegates Tuesday that over the last 26 months “we have witnessed a brutal conflict in Syria”.

She said the Assad regime, drawing upon an arsenal of heavy weapons, aircraft, ballistic missiles, and potentially chemical weapons, has killed or injured untold numbers of civilians who for many months manifested their opposition purely through peaceful protest.

She said the sustained violence has created a severe humanitarian crisis with more than 1.4 million refugees and 4.25 million internally displaced persons within Syria.

“The consequences of this crisis are growing more dire not only within Syria, but across the region,” DiCarlo said.

She singled out the generosity of the governments and people of Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and others who host large numbers of refugees “which has been extraordinary.”

“But these countries now face grave threats to their security and an overwhelming economic burden. It is clear that we need a Syrian-led peaceful political transition,” she added.