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Greetings from Global Policy Forum!
This message covers a two-week period, during which we have posted a very large number of items to the GPF web site. It isn't the slow pace of summer that has caused us to miss a week, but rather our intense focus on a GPF report on NGO access at the UN.
Finally on Thursday, June 17th, we completed the report, entitled: "NGOs and the UN System: Input for the Second Report of the Secretary General." This 30 page report discusses the considerable progress and also the many setbacks. It speaks quite frankly about problems NGOs face, including strained relations with Assistant Secretary General Gillian Martin Sorensen, headaches with the new security rules, problems of access to Secretary General Annan and more. The report makes a large number of suggestions for improved access and improved NGO relations with the UN. It draws on extensive research over many months, as well as comments from many NGO representatives.
While the GPF report is especially comprehensive, other groups have also submitted reports to the Secretariat as part of the input process to the second report of the Secretary General on relations between the UN and NGOs. Particularly important are reports by the Conference of NGOs (CONGO) and by a group of major human rights organizations. Both have been posted to the GPF web site.
On Tuesday, June 8, the NGO Working Group on the Security Council met with Ambassador Robert Fowler of Canada, Chairman of the Council's Angola Sanctions Committee. The day before, he had briefed the Council on his month-long trip to Africa to investigate enforcement of the sanctions. These ban sales of diamonds from the areas controlled by UNITA, the rebel group led by Jonas Savimbi, and also ban the sale of arms to Savimbi's group. Until Amb. Fowler started his work, the sanctions were considered a sham, and completely unenforced.
Fowler's briefing was one of the most interesting we have ever had from a member of the Council. He has gathered a great deal of information and has considered the issue from every angle. To those who proposed a boycott of diamonds, he answered that a broad boycott would harm the population of many diamond producing countries and therefore would not be the best approach at first, to be adopted only as a late measure, if other options fail. Much hinges on the willingness of the DeBeers diamond cartel to respond positively to the sanctions and act to enforce them.
Amb. Fowler has submitted a major report to the Council, which we have posted on the site. It makes 14 recommendations to tighten the sanctions' effect on worldwide diamond trading and sales, including convening two expert groups to study ways and means. While he thinks a leakproof diamond embargo is impossible, he believes that better sanctions enforcement will make the illegal diamond trade more risky and expensive, cutting sharply into Savimbi's income. The report proposes UN monitors to help enforce sanctions, the first time the UN would be directly involved in sanctions enforcement.
Other recent activities of the NGO Working Group on the Security Council have included a meeting on June 9th with Italy's Ambassador Paolo Fulci, the President of ECOSOC, who has taken steps to bring together the work of the Security Council and the work of ECOSOC. There also were two meetings with two African Ambassadors on the Council - Dennis Rewaka of Gabon on June 11 (last month's Council president) and Baboucarr-Blaise Jagne of Gambia on June 14 (current president of the Council).
The ECOSOC Committee on NGOs has been holding its twice-yearly meetings. The Committee is the intergovernmental body that passes on accreditation and establishes rules for NGOs at the UN. The Committee is considering various proposals to limit NGO access. In its accreditation hearings, it voted by a large margin to deny accreditation to Human Rights in China, a respected human rights group based in New York. A Chinese delegate spoke against accreditation, claiming that the group aims at subverting the government, that its activities are contrary to the UN Charter and that it it not an NGO but a "political organization."
Sadly, member states have politicized the NGO accreditation process and in doing so they hope to silence their critics and avoid accountability. As a result, human rights NGOs have a particularly difficult time gaining accreditation. All too often, the Committee has rejected accreditation on flimsy, politically-motivated grounds.
This week, GPF is pleased to bring to our site a new page - "Gender and Inequality." This page is an expansion of our information on "Inequality of Wealth and Income Distribution" -- part of the Social and Economic Policy section of the web site. In the new gender page we will provide information about how economic restructuring and globilization has recast gender relations and altered the status of women. This week we've inaugurated this discussion with ten new articles.
At long last, the Security Council seems to be moving towards a new policy on sanctions against Iraq. The UK helped promote a shift. About a month ago, the UK shifted from its position of unconditional support for the US policy of maintaining general trade sanctions on Iraq. Perhaps in response to mounting public pressure (or pressure from business interests that want to trade with Iraq), the UK struck a new position that favored a partial lifting of the sanctions, in exchange for Iraqi concessions on disarmament. Intense negotiations have been going on in the Security Council, as members seek to find agreement on a new sanctions resolution. The US has finally decided to shift its own position and this may open the way for a new accord. We hope when the Security Council meets to discuss Iraq this week that it can agree on a significant change in policy that will ease these terrible sanctions.
In closing, we pay tribute to the great intern team at GPF. Five interns are working in the office this summer: Victoria Clarke, Benjamin Holt, Christian Kaufholz, Jessica Moffett and Olivia Tecosky. They have been doing an outstanding job and last week helped GPF post a record 52 items to the web site. To celebrate, we had an outing on Long Island, with present and past interns. The weather was beautiful. We had lunch outdoors, went for a swim, and ended the day with a spirited match of croquet, won by Jessica Moffett.
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