U.S. Prevails on Climate Draft, Ban says

The U.N. chief asserts that the text emanating from the Bali summit won't include specific targets for lowering greenhouse gas emissions.

NUSA DUA, INDONESIA, Dec. 13th. LA Times-- As the United Nations climate conference here was drawing to its conclusion, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday acknowledged that the United States' goal of deleting specific emission reduction guidelines from a draft agreement had succeeded. "Realistically, it may be too ambitious if delegations would be expected to be able to agree on targets of greenhouse gas emission reductions" here in Bali, he told reporters. "Practically speaking, this will have to be negotiated down the road." The Bali meeting was convened to draw up a "road map" for negotiations on a new treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire in 2012. An early draft of the guidelines called for industrialized countries to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions 25% to 40% below 1990 levels by 2020, but the Bush administration has resisted the inclusion of any targets. Chief U.S. negotiator Harlan L. Watson reiterated that position Wednesday. "The reality in this business is that once numbers appear in the text, it prejudges the outcome and will tend to drive the negotiations in one direction," he said.

Another contentious section of the draft called for global emissions to peak in 10 to 15 years and be reduced to at least half of 2000 levels by 2050, proposed requirements that have been vigorously opposed by China and India. Both countries' emissions have more than doubled since 1990, and both want only voluntary standards for developing nations. "If we want to take a voluntary approach for 70% of the world's emissions, I think that is just a nonstarter, it doesn't work," said John Baird, Canada's environment minister. He argued that if wealthy countries were the only ones to accept emissions targets, pollution would simply be shifted to developing nations. "We can close a steel mill today in Canada. But if we just import the steel from China, what will we have accomplished? Absolutely nothing," he said. China's climate change ambassador, Yu Qingtai, said his country might eventually be willing to adopt caps, but only if it received major technology assistance from Western nations for developing cleaner energy processes. Such assistance has not been forthcoming, he added. Indian representatives also called for technical assistance and said their nation's economy was too immature and fragile for them to accept emission caps. "We are not ripe enough to make any binding commitments. We are a developing country," said N.N. Meena, junior environment minister.

Former Vice President Al Gore, who flew in to Bali on Wednesday after accepting his share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo this week for his contributions to the fight against global warming, said the United States was deliberately impeding progress here. "The position of the administration in the U.S. right now appears to be to try to block any progress in Bali. I hope that will change," he said. He did offer some optimism. "I know from experience," he said, "that when breakthroughs do occur, they usually happen in the last 48 hours."

Australia had a partial shift in its position Wednesday. The country has long argued against adopting the Kyoto treaty, which calls for 36 industrialized nations to reduce their emissions 5% below 1990 levels by 2012 -- in part because its emissions have grown by 26% since 1990. But on Wednesday, newly elected Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd presented ratification papers for the treaty to Ban, eliciting a long round of applause from the delegates. Australia's signature leaves the U.S. as the only major industrialized country not to have ratified the protocol. In his talk, Rudd chided the United States, whose emissions have risen more than 16% since 1990. "We expect all developed nations -- those within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol and those outside that framework -- to embrace comparable efforts in order to bring about the global outcomes the world now expects of us."
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Rape of Girl, 15, Exposes Abuses in Brazil Prison System

BRASÍLIA, NY Times Dec. 12th. — The police jail at Abaetetuba could not be torn down soon enough for Márcia Soares, a lawyer and federal human rights official here. To her, the jail has come to symbolize everything that is wrong with Brazil’s efforts to safeguard women and children from violence. It was at Abaetetuba, in the NE state of Para on the fringes of the Amazon, that a 15-year-old girl arrested on suspicion of petty theft was illegally placed among 34 male inmates in late October. For 26 days they treated her as their plaything, raping and torturing her repeatedly. Sometimes she traded sex for food; other times, she was simply raped, federal investigators here said. The police in the jail did more than turn their backs on the violence. They shaved her head with a knife to make her look more like a boy, investigators said, and now are blaming her for lying about her age.

The case is causing soul-searching here in Brazil’s capital, where federal officials have become increasingly concerned about the treatment of women and minors in the nation’s crowded prison system and the failure of judges throughout the country to prosecute cases of torture. Women make up only 5 percent of Brazil’s prison population, but the number is growing. States have not built enough jails and prisons with separate facilities for women, even though federal law requires such separation. A recent study commissioned by the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva showed that female prisoners were being illegally placed with men or transvestites in five Brazilian states and being subjected to torture and sexual abuse. Even as Brazil was raised in November to the United Nations highest human development category, its spotty human rights history and mixed record of punishing those guilty of abuses have been an Achilles’ heel internationally. A SWAT team operates in Rio de Janeiro to root out and kill drug traffickers with impunity. The police are rarely convicted under a 1997 law against torture, because of an “institutionalizing of torture” under Brazil’s military dictatorship and more than 300 years of slavery, said Paulo Vanucchi, Brazil’s human rights minister.

The case of the 15-year-old will be another test of justice in the largely lawless Amazon region. Two years ago, a Brazilian rancher ordered the killing of Dorothy Mae Stang, 73, an American-born nun and rain forest advocate. She was shot to death on a jungle road. The rancher, Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura, was sentenced to 30 years in prison. What has been particularly disheartening to federal human rights officials in the case of the 15-year-old girl is how many people had the chance to protect her. Ms. Soares, the lawyer, said the police, the judge and a public defender who had visited the jail all knew the teenager was in an all-male setting. “Several officials were aware of what was happening, and at worst they were complicit in it,” Ms. Soares said. “It’s a very serious situation.” Ana Júlia Carepa, the governor of Para, has been scrambling to clean up the mess since the situation became public late last month. Ms. Carepa pressed Raimundo Benassuly, the state police chief, to resign the day after he said publicly that the girl had lied about her age because she had a “mental deficiency.” The police have said that the girl had claimed she was 19, not 15, during several run-ins with the law. Ms. Soares said that officials, including the judge in the case, a woman, did not press the girl for documentation proving she was an adult, even though she is under five feet tall and weighs about 80 pounds. “When I first saw her I thought she was 12, not 15,” Ms. Soares said. For Ms. Carepa, the girl’s age is beside the point. “If she is 15, 20, 50, 80 years old or almost 100, it doesn’t matter,” she told journalists in Rio last month. “A woman cannot be in a cell with men.” Ms. Carepa said that the jail would be torn down and replaced with something that has facilities for women.

The judge who placed the girl in the all-male jail, Clarice Maria Andrade, is being investigated and could lose her job. Two others in her office are accused of altering a document to make it seem as if the judge had approved a transfer from the jail shortly after the police made the request, not 12 days later. Local officials were already familiar with the girl before she was arrested and placed in the Abaetetuba jail on Oct. 21. Growing up in a broken home, she had left school before and frequented an area known for child prostitution, Ms. Soares said. At the time of her arrest, she was shuttling among her parents’ homes and an uncle’s house, and no one seemed to keep careful tabs on her. During the 26 days, no relative came to the jail looking for her. Within her first two days in jail, a man raped her in the bathroom, the girl told investigators. Inmates rely on visiting relatives to bring food. With no such visits, extreme hunger soon overtook the girl and she began trading sex for food, investigators said. Other men, however, simply raped her when they wanted to, and tortured her for amusement, investigators said. Some placed crumpled papers between her toes as she slept and lighted them, Ms. Soares said, adding that the girl still had burn marks on her feet.

Residents heard the girl’s screams from the road, which is near the jail windows. Yet for weeks no one came to her rescue. It was only after an anonymous note reached the local child protection services agency that she was removed from the jail. In recent days, she and her family have been relocated under a federal witness protection program. The girl’s father complained of death threats from the police. He said they had tried to press him to say that the girl was 19 or 20. “It’s now up to us to protect her and help her to start a new life,” Ms. Soares said. “And we need to keep up the political pressure, so that justice has a chance.”
by Alexei Barrionuevo
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Human Movement: it's About Taking Care of People

The ideal is for people not to have to move, and to care for them if they do.

The Age, Australia Dec. 11 - The 21st century will be defined by the movement of people from one country and continent to another. The number living outside their homeland already stands at 200 million, the same as the population of Brazil, the fifth largest country. Looking to the future, it seems certain that the world will witness new and more complex patterns of displacement and migration. Climate change and natural disasters will make life increasingly unsustainable in many parts of the planet. The growing gap between the winners and losers in the globalisation process will induce millions more to look for a future outside their own countries.

These developments have created a number of important challenges for the international community. The first arises from the increasingly complex nature of human mobility. The majority of people on the move are migrants who leave their own country because they are unable to maintain their livelihoods at home and because their labour is needed elsewhere. Others are forced to abandon their homes as a result of persecution and armed conflict. Under international law, these people are considered as refugees. They have been granted specific rights, including protection from being forced to return to their own country. The responsibility of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN's refugee agency, is to uphold the rights of this latter group. In many parts of the world, however, refugees and migrants are to be found travelling alongside each other, heading in the same direction, using the same forms of transport and lacking the passports and visas that states require them to carry. Such "irregular" movements have prompted many states to erect new barriers to the admission of foreign nationals. Regrettably, these measures have had the effect of preventing refugees from seeking the safety they need. We must therefore ensure that border controls enable people to exercise their right to seek and enjoy asylum in other states.

A second challenge is to provide more opportunities for people to move in a safe and legal manner. Most states have now recognised the need for goods, services, capital and information to flow freely across national borders. But governments are apprehensive about applying the same principal to the movement of people. The result has been a massive growth in the expansion of an industry whose purpose and profit lies in smuggling and trafficking people across international frontiers. As well as cracking down on such activities, states should consider opening new channels and expanding existing programs of legal migration. The forces that are prompting many people to migrate are deeply entrenched within the international economy. It is an illusion to think that their numbers can be brought down in the present and dynamic phase of globalisation. Greater efforts are therefore needed to prevent the emergence of situations in which people are forced to leave their homes as a result of human rights abuses, armed conflict or other calamities that disrupt their lives and livelihoods.

If this third challenge is to be tackled in an effective manner, serious efforts must be made to promote environmentally sensitive forms of development in countries where the struggle for survival threatens to lead to violence. Above all, governments in every part of the world must be encouraged and supported to protect the lives and wellbeing of their citizens, thereby enabling them to live a peaceful and prosperous life in their own country. When people move from one country to another, they should do so out of choice and not because it is the only way they can survive.
By Antonio Guterres who is the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
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Some Facts about Nigeria

Nigeria – Some Facts

• One fifth of Africans live in Nigeria.
• It has 250 ethnic groups speaking over 350 languages or dialects.
• Nigeria is the 13^th largest oil producer in the world.
• Of 135 million Nigerians, 75% live in poverty.
• One in twenty are living with HIV/AIDs.
• More than 7 million children (mostly girls) do not go to Primary School.
• The health system is rated as one of the poorest in the world.
• Half the population depend on agriculture for its living.
• Nigeria has one of the fastest rates of urbanisation – 53% - in the world.
• Lagos will be the largest city in the world by 2015.

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Mugabe’s Presence Hijacks European-African Meeting

LISBON, Dec. 8 — A summit meeting of leaders from Europe and Africa on Saturday was dominated by divisions between the two continents over trade and criticism from European leaders of human rights abuses in Zimbabwe. Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya was among the leaders of 80 European and African countries meeting in Lisbon Saturday. The first such European Union-African meeting in seven years began amid growing concern in Europe that its economic and political influence in Africa was being eclipsed by China’s growing economic influence there.

But the start of the two-day meeting was overshadowed by the presence of Robert G. Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president, who remains a liberation hero in some African countries. His appearance, however, led Gordon Brown, Britain’s prime minister, to decline to attend. In her speech, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, criticized Mr. Mugabe, who is accused of human rights abuses, vote rigging and substantially worsening the level of poverty in his country. “The whole European Union has the same view of what is happening there,” Mrs. Merkel said, according to a copy of her speech distributed at the meeting. “Zimbabwe concerns all of us, in Europe and in Africa.” After criticism of Zimbabwe from other European leaders, African countries appeared to close ranks around Mr. Mugabe. Senegal’s president, Abdoulaye Wade, said that the comments about Mr. Mugabe were “not true,” and that Mrs. Merkel was misinformed. “Zimbabwe is making progress toward democracy and should be helped, not sanctioned,” he said. President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, also speaking about human rights, avoided criticizing Mr. Mugabe, according to Baroness Amos, a former deputy foreign minister representing Britain here in Mr. Brown’s place. In a briefing with reporters, Lady Amos cited Mr. Mbeki’s role as a negotiator between Mr. Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party and the opposition as a legitimate explanation for his reluctance to confront his fellow leader.

Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, whose government is accused by many countries and aid groups of causing the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, was also at the meeting, as was Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Libya’s president. In all, 80 European and African governments were represented. A meeting between Mr. Bashir and senior European officials yielded no breakthrough over plans to send non-African peacekeepers to Darfur. Access to Mr. Mugabe was closely controlled. As he left his five-star hotel in Cascais, on the coast near Lisbon, on Saturday morning, he refused to answer questions from reporters as his security team jostled a camera crew from the BBC. In order for Mr. Mugabe to attend the meeting, his Portuguese hosts had to waive a European Union visa ban that normally prevents him and 130 other Zimbabwean officials from traveling to Europe. Mr. Mugabe was invited when southern African nations made it clear that they would not attend the meeting were he excluded. In 2003, a similar standoff prevented a summit meeting from taking place, but such is the concern over China’s growing economic influence in Africa that all but a handful of European leaders agreed to override their objections and sit down with Zimbabwe’s president.

Ireland’s prime minister, Bertie Ahern, said that he would have preferred Mr. Mugabe had stayed away and said human rights needed to be addressed at the meeting. “Any country that halves the life expectancy of its population speaks for itself,” Mr. Ahern told reporters. Though Europe remains Africa’s biggest trading partner, China’s investment ambitions were underlined recently when a Chinese bank bought 20 percent of Standard Bank, Africa’s largest lender, for $5.4 billion. According to the European Commission, 800 Chinese companies have invested $1 billion in Africa through 2006, the latest year for which figures are available. The country imports 32 percent of its oil from Africa, and oil-related investment in recent years amounts to $16 billion, the commission said.

Despite their historical ties to Africa, Europeans have found it difficult to compete with China, which finances giant infrastructure projects and offers investment without conditions related to human rights or government transparency. European leaders have called for a new partnership between the continents based on common interests, from trade to climate change, instead of the traditional relationship between donors and aid recipients. But the legacy of Europe’s colonial past is a source of continuing controversy. “Africa doesn’t want charity or paternalism,” said Alpha Oumar Konaré, the chairman of the African Union, at the opening session on Saturday. “We don’t want anyone doing things for us. We want to play in the global economy but with new rules.” Mr. Konaré also criticized the European Union’s strategy of pressing individual African regions and states to sign new trade deals, called economic partnership agreements. He said the practice was divisive and would hurt the continent’s industries and rural poor. Mr. Wade, of Senegal, accused Europe of trying to impose on Africa a “straitjacket that does not work.”
by Michel Euler/Associated Press
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Christmas Celebration