Category: UN INSIDER

By J Nastranis

UNITED NATIONS (IDN) – United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has stressed the pressing need for increased diplomacy on vexatious global issues, broad adherence to the aims of the landmark Paris climate accord, wider engagement with the world’s youth and dedicated efforts to ensure gender parity across the UN system.

In an interview with UN News in the run-up to the 72nd Regular Session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA 72), which will convene at UN Headquarters in New York on September 12, Guterres said the UN “must be an instrument for a surge in diplomacy for peace.” Guterres, the Prime Minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002, and the former UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), took up his post on 1 January 1, 2017.

By Rita Joshi

BONN | ORDOS CITY (IDN) – A new strategy aimed at achieving Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) by 2030 will be a major outcome of the 13th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 13) to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), which opened in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China, on September 6.

This is the first Conference hosted by China out of the three 1992 Earth Summit’s Rio Conventions – on biological diversity and Climate Change, according to UNCCD Executive Secretary Monique Barbut. The target to be achieved between 2018 and 2030 has indicators to measure change. It provides “an organizing principle that we can all rally behind and achieve a specific change.”

By Adriano José Timossi

The United Nations General Assembly adopted on 28 August 2017 a draft resolution calling for the organization of the Second High-level United Nations Conference on South-South Cooperation to be held in Argentina in 2019. The Conference will mark the 40th anniversary of the first UN Conference on Technical Cooperation among Developing Countries also held in Buenos Aires almost forty years ago, a milestone event in the history of the UN and multilateralism.

GENEVA (IDN | SOUTHNEWS) – The United Nations General Assembly adopted by consensus on August 28, 2017 the draft resolution titled Second High-level United Nations Conference on South-South Cooperation to be held in Buenos Aires from March 20 to 22, 2019.

By J Nastranis

UNITED NATIONS (IDN) – When Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping met at the Kremlin on July 4, 2017 they stressed the need for establishing a peace mechanism that would require North Korea to suspend its nuclear programme and the United States to halt military exercises and use of the anti-missile defence system in South Korea.

The Russian-Chinese Kremlin meeting came after North Korea, officially the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), said it had successfully launched an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of hitting Alaska, the largest and most sparsely populated U.S. state in the northwest of Canada.

By J Nastranis

NEW YORK (IDN) – Global warming is expected to have a significant impact on future yields of everything from rice to fish, particularly in countries situated closer to the equator, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has warned, and urged the Asia-Pacific economies to take a leading role in adaptation and mitigation.

“Many APEC [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation] economies have already felt the full force of agricultural losses from natural disasters in recent years, with the vast majority of these being climate related,” said Kundhavi Kadiresan, Assistant Director-General and FAO Regional Representative for Asia and the Pacific, reported UN News.

By Sultan Karimov

BISHKEK (IDN) – An elusive denizen of the mountains of Central and South Asia, the snow leopard (panthera uncia) inhabits parts of 12 countries: Afghanistan, Bhutan, China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

Its geographic range, 60 percent of which is in China, runs from the Hindu Kush in eastern Afghanistan and the Syr Darya through the mountains of Pamir, Tian Shan, Karakorum, Kashmir, Kunlun, and the Himalaya to southern Siberia, where the range covers the Russian Altai, Sayan, Tannu-Ola mountains and the mountains to the west of Lake Baikal.

By Tariq Rauf*

ASTANA (IDN) – The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Kazakhstan will formally inaugurate a Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) Bank located at the Ulba Metallurgical Plant at Öskemen (formerly Ust Kamenogorsk) on August 29.

This event will mark an important milestone in the long march for the IAEA to set up an IAEA owned and operated nuclear fuel bank as envisaged in the 1957 IAEA Statute. This initiative was proposed in September 2006 by the Washington, DC-based Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) which offered US$50 million to the IAEA, provided by global investor Warren Buffet, to set up an IAEA LEU Bank by raising an additional $100 million.

By Santo D. Banerjee

UNITED NATIONS (IDN) – Despite the scepticism – if not opposition – of the veto-wielding United States to realizing a two-State solution, a senior United Nations official has urged the parties to the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict to recommit to that solution and to ending the occupation of Palestinian lands.

This view was unequivocally supported by the representatives of Bolivia and Uruguay, two of the 10 non-permanent members of the Security Council in addition to five permanent members (P5): China, France, Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

By J Nastranis

UNITED NATIONS (IDN) – Fifty years after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it continues to control these areas through repression, institutionalized discrimination, and systematic abuses of the Palestinian population’s rights.

Many of Israel’s abusive practices have been carried out in the name of security. Palestinian armed groups have carried out scores of lethal attacks on civilians and launched thousands of rocket attacks on Israeli civilian areas, also in violation of international humanitarian law.

But activities to mark 50 years of Israeli occupation of Palestine and support the two-State solution took the centre stage in recent efforts to quell tensions, especially in Jerusalem, and create conditions for mutual respect, the Palestinian Rights Committee heard on August 8, 2017.

By Bernhard Schell

AMMAN (IDN) – The United Nations is apparently incapable of pushing for a political solution to the more than two-year-old conflict plaguing Yemen, one of the Arab world’s poorest countries, which has been devastated by a war between forces loyal to the internationally-recognised government of President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi and those allied to the Houthi rebel movement.

More than 7,600 people have been killed and 42,000 injured since March 2015, the majority in air strikes by a Saudi-led multinational coalition that backs the president, according to independent sources. The conflict and a blockade imposed by the coalition have also triggered a humanitarian disaster, leaving 70% of the population in need of aid.