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| Lessons from Johannesburg: | ||||
What is the future for UN Summits? |
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Rémi Parmentier, Political Director, Greenpeace International 10 September 2002 The author – a Greenpeace participant at the Johannesburg Summit - argues that the question is not whether there should be other large UN summits in the future, but how they are conducted. He proposes that the sequencing of such summits be reversed, with the Heads of State and Government speaking first to set the agenda. He argues that negotiators at the Johannesburg Summit were out-manoeuvred by the Bush administration whose agenda was to weaken multilateralism and the United Nations. If US Secretary of State Colin Powell had given his hard-liner speech at the beginning of last week’s Johannesburg Summit, rather than at the end on 4th September, the outcome of the Earth Summit would probably have been different. The truth is that NGO representatives were not alone booing Powell. In the five minutes he took to deliver his speech, Powell managed to increase the outrage against the Bush administration’s policy on environment and development by several orders of magnitude. When Powell spoke, the clamour of reprobation could be heard also in the government delegates’ rows, and the vast majority of delegates was more outspoken from that time. Had the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation not been finished by then, the US would not have got away with as much as it did, especially on the issues of climate change. And perhaps government negotiators would not have traded away so easily the proposed global target and time-table to increase to 10% the share of new renewable energy by 2010. Government representatives were angry when Powell claimed that the Bush administration was taking the challenges of climate change seriously, because everybody knows that the US is doing everything it can to sink the Kyoto Protocol and to undermine the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and that the so-called Bush alternative plan to Kyoto would lead to an approximate 30% increase in US greenhouse gas emissions. This is in clear violation of the United States’ legal obligation to stabilise emissions at a level which will ‘avoid dangerous climate change’, as set forth in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to which the US is a party. Under the US Constitution, a ratified treaty has the force of the law of the land. A few seconds later, the majority of government representatives could again not believe their ears when Powell said that the aim of the US in promoting the World Trade Organisation’s free trade agenda was to help developing countries benefit from it. They knew of course that since the ministerial meeting of the WTO in Doha last year, the US has increased its own subsidies to its agriculture sector, thereby reducing even further the marketability of developing countries’ agricultural products in the world. The increased funds for development promised at the Monterey conference last March represent only one sixth of agriculture subsidies. Finally, Powell’s restatement of the US blackmailing policies that would stop development aid to people in countries without good governance (as defined by the US) was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In the Bush administration lexicon, good governance means trade liberalisation. Not only does the Bush administration act in violation of their own free trade credo when they increase US government subsidies, but many governments believe that good governance starts with respect and support for international law and international agreements. Formally, the US may exercise its right to not be a party to such agreements, but it should not use its immense power to bully those who participate in them, as it has been doing in recent months with—for example—the International Criminal Court or the Kyoto Protocol. US opposition to an international framework on corporate accountability proposed as part of the Johannesburg agenda was also considered an extraordinary breach of the US administration’s stated goal of good governance, especially in the light of G.W. Bush’s recent rhetoric on corporate accountability prompted by the Enron and Worldcom scandals. Now that the Johannesburg Summit is over, many are asking whether such summits are a waste of time, and whether they are doomed to failure each time. "Waste of time" are the words that the US—engaged in a campaign to undermine and weaken the United Nations and multilateralism—wants to hear. The truth is that the Summit has put sustainable development and the environment back on the public and political agendas, and George Bush’s war against sustainability and the environment has been exposed more clearly than ever. This alone was quite an achievement, less than a year after September 11. The issue of climate change and the role that renewable energy can play to create a safer future has never been so prominent, despite the absence of a global target and time-table in the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation. A so called coalition of the willing (a group of more than 30 countries including the EU and other European countries, small island states from the South Pacific and the Caribbean and others) pledged at the end of the summit to set their own targets to increase the share of renewable energy, and to promote them internationally. What is true is that the way these summits are conducted needs a thorough re-think. Until now, the appearance of Heads of State and Government at such summits has taken place at the end, after a lengthy process (of generally around two years) involving civil servants first, and then ministers. Civil servants and ministers are both pressed to reach agreement before their bosses turn up. The result is a race to the bottom, the search for compromise at all cost, also known as the lowest common denominator. Inviting Heads of State and Government to speak first and negotiators to act in conformity with what their bosses said would make a lot of sense. After all, aren’t they our leaders? During the long Johannesburg preparatory process, Greenpeace urged the civil servants, the ministers, and then the Heads of State and Government not to lower their ambitions, and to maintain high goals for the Summit’s outcome. If the US does not want to play with you, so be it, we said. It was better for the US to express its reservations to any section or paragraph of the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation by way of footnotes (a well established practice in international negotiations) than to let them bring everyone’s ambition down to a lowest common denominator dictated by the Bush administration—and then walk away leaving everyone else at the bottom. Alas, civil servants and ministers did not listen. It was more important to bring the US along, they said, than maintaining their own principles and objectives. With detailed case studies, we warned that the US has always used the tactic of bringing the common playing field to the lowest level, and then detached itself once it had managed to do so.1 But governments did not listen, and the Plan of Implementation became a sad reflection of the lowest common denominator as dictated by the US. Even so, during the closing ceremony, on September 4th, the US delegation read an interpretative note in which they said—in a nutshell— that they do not consider themselves bound by any of the decisions contained in the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation. How weak the text of the Plan of Implementation was did not matter to the US. The US’s goal at the Summit was to state its right to act unilaterally, regardless of the concessions they gained. Let’s hope the rest of the international community learn their lessons, and stop racing to the bottom at the next summit. But will there be another chance? |
