Tag Archives: Arms Trade Treaty

Latest Developments, August 3

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The UN has declared three additional famine zones in Somalia – including the refugee camps in the capital Mogadishu – on top of the two areas already considered as such since last month. The famine is expected to spread throughout southern Somalia and persist until December.

The Guardian’s Mark Tran goes through the factors hampering the delivery of emergency food aid in Somalia: lack of funds, hostile Islamist rebels, US anti-terror legislation and corruption. And ABC informs us we can add another item to the list: the Mogadishu offensive launched by African Union and government troops against Al Shabab.

There is also increasing concern about the Ogaden, a predominantly Somali part of southeastern Ethiopia where not even the International Committee for the Red Cross is allowed to set foot. According to the Royal African Society’s Richard Dowden, “ it has been fenced off and closed to outsiders for years because Ethiopia fears it might be infiltrated by anti-Ethiopian insurgents. Atrocities by Ethiopian troops are reported but cannot be verified. If the rest of the region is suffering, the closed Ogaden may be hiding an even larger disaster.” The area is not completely closed off, however, as Canada’s Africa Oil Corp. has just released an update on its exploration activities in East Africa, including the Ogaden where: “Preparations for drilling, including purchase of materials, execution of drilling related contracts, civil works, and environmental permits have commenced.” The Canadians are not alone, as Reuters reports “a surge in requests for exploration rights” in the Ogaden’s 18 oil and gas exploration blocks, which Ethiopia believes “may contain gas reserves of 4.7 trillion cubic feet of gas and major oil deposits” which could be ready for  production in six years.

A Colombian mining union leader has been shot dead by paramilitaries, according to the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions, which says his own union “had reported threats to its leaders that were believed to be tied to the contested takeover of Frontino by [Canadian mining companies] Modora[sic] and Gran Colombia, and the sacking of all miners.” And Ghana’s Chronicle reports a dispute between inhabitants of the town of Yayaso and Canadian Newmont Mining. The latter claims it is serious about social responsibility and spent nine months working out a compensation package for Yayaso’s inhabitants to relocate. But a number of the villagers refuse to leave and allege that the company has already destroyed several farms and plans to dump mine waste in revered burial sites. There are currently no Canadian laws in place requiring the investigation of domestic companies for alleged wrongdoing overseas. A bill that would have threatened to withdraw public support –  but not to impose fines or prison sentences – for Canadian companies found guilty of such offences was defeated by parliament last fall.

Royal Dutch Shell has agreed to pay compensation that could exceed $400 million for two oil spills in Nigeria, after a class action suit by a group of inhabitants of the Niger Delta. And victims’ families have won the right to sue Chiquita in the US for complicity in torture and killings of employees by Colombian paramilitary groups.

Jewelry giant Tiffany & Co.’s CEO Michael Kowalski writes in the San Francisco Chronicle: “There are places in our nation, belonging to all Americans, that are too special to mine, too special to develop for oil and gas and too special to forever sacrifice for short-term gain.”  It is for that reason, he says, that his company opposes the mining of California’s Bodie Hills as well as the legislation that “would eliminate protections and allow development on more than 43 million acres of America’s most fragile and important lands.” But as the New York Times reported last month, Tiffany & Co. has tried to have gold exempted from US legislation requiring companies to disclose their use of conflict minerals.

Kenneth Epps of disarmament advocacy group Project Ploughshares accuses Canada of having “reversed its previous low-key but constructive role at the United Nations [Arms Trade Treaty] preparatory meetings to become a potential treaty spoiler,” in particular by pushing for exemptions to sporting and hunting firearms. “To work,” Epps argues, “the ATT must adopt high universal standards that would require many states to improve their arms transfer controls to meet these higher standards. A lowest common denominator approach to the ATT, by locking in low global standards, would actually make matters worse.”

And Al Jazeera English tweets: “Now that #Mubarak is on trial, do his foreign supporters owe #Egypt an apology?”

Latest Developments, July 26

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A UN mission has observed food and fuel shortages and a “strained medical system” in Gadhafi-held parts of Libya. “Although the mission observed aspects of normalcy in Tripoli, members identified pockets of vulnerability where people need urgent humanitarian assistance,” humanitarian coordinator Laurence Hart said. Despite NATO’s military intervention, the amount of territory controlled by the Gadhafi regime has grown by about 20 percent over the last five months.

Twelve Democratic members of the US Senate have joined their Republican colleagues in opposing the proposed Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) on the basis of a perceived threat to the Second Amendment right to bear arms. “Ratification requires two-thirds of the Senate. So far 57 senators have said they would vote against the treaty, expected to be wrapped up next year,” according to a US News and World Report piece, which also quotes a Republican letter of opposition: “Our firearm freedoms are not negotiable.” The ATT, as currently being negotiated, would apply only to the international transfer of arms.

The UN Conference on Trade and Development has released its World Investment Report for 2011. The top story suggests a world moving towards greater equality, at least among states: “For the first time, developing and transition economies together attracted more than half of global FDI flows.” On the other hand, foreign direct investment is declining in some of the poorest regions, most notably in Africa which saw a nine percent drop in 2010. The report also addresses the current state of corporate social responsibility: “Voluntary CSR standards can complement government regulatory efforts; however, where they are promoted as a substitute for labour, social and environmental protection legislation, or where CSR standards are not based on national or international rules, then these voluntary standards can potentially undermine, substitute or distract from governmental regulatory efforts.”

Speaking in Hong Kong, US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton pushed for “true regional integration” in the Asia-Pacific as opposed to a “hodgepodge of inconsistent and partial bilateral agreements,” the pending US-South Korea trade deal notwithstanding. According to Stewart Patrick of the Council on Foreign Relations, Clinton’s message was consistent with American policy since the end of WWII but: “What is novel in Clinton’s approach is her insistence that developing countries—which have often been granted special treatment—can no longer be exempted from binding rules.”

The UN’s special envoy for the Middle East has told the Security Council: “The Palestinian Authority is ready to assume the responsibilities of statehood at any point in the near future.” But the US, one of five permanent members with veto power, has said it will oppose any attempt by the Palestinians to obtain state recognition from the UN in September.

Following last week’s deadly anti-government protests in Malawi, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a US government agency, has put on hold a five-year $350 million deal signed with the East African country earlier this year. The US government agency says it will conduct a review before deciding how to proceed, but terminating the agreement is a possibility.

After trying for over a decade, the International Gay and Lesbian Association has gained the right to attend and speak at UN meetings. Support for the group’s consultative status came primarily from Europe and the Americas, as well as Japan, South Korea, India and Mongolia. Opposition came largely from African and Islamic countries, as well as Russia and China.

University of London economist Costas Lapavitsas looks at the lessons to be drawn from earlier debt crises in poor countries. He criticizes policies that protect lenders while pushing the burden of debt onto the public, suggesting a possible remedy whereby an “audit commission could examine public debt for its legality, legitimacy, odiousness and social sustainability, providing grounds for its cancellation.” He also calls for “international co-operation among borrowers” and says “engagement with multilateral organisations, principally the International Monetary Fund, is to be avoided.”

Foreign Policy columnist Charles “The Optimist” Kenny calls for the leaders of Somalia’s militant Islamist group, Al Shabab, to be charged by the International Criminal Court for “crimes against humanity by method of mass starvation.” But at least some of the blame should go to the “modern world system” that has undermined the centuries-old, sustainable pastoralism that is uniquely adapted to producing food in one of the harshest climates on earth, according to Helen de Jode who has edited a book on the topic.

Esther Dyson, CEO of EDventure Holdings, says there are two types of investors: “Venture capitalists want to fund the next Facebook, while philanthropists want to use Facebook to support good causes.” And although she does not expect or want the former to start behaving like the latter, she suggests “they could focus a little more on training new employees rather than poaching them from the competition at inflated salaries.”

Latest Developments, July 25

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The UN will hold a donors conference in Nairobi on Wednesday to try to raise $1.6 billion for drought assistance in the Horn of Africa and is looking into allegations that some of its officials are demanding money in exchange for food in refugee camps there. Former US ambassador to neighbouring Ethiopia, David Shinn, lays out some of the obstacles to helping in Somalia, including Al Shabab’s dislike of foreign aid agencies and US policy that is fixated on not helping the Islamist group in any way. A pair of Chatham House experts hold a similar view: “Both parties bear responsibility for treating emergency aid as a political tool.”

The Guardian’s Simon Bowers reports the UK’s Serious Fraud Office is allotting more resources to investigating overseas bribery cases than to fraud schemes hatched in London’s financial offices, “raising concerns that tackling the very biggest UK fraud cases may be slipping as the agency’s top priority.”

Mike Koehler, aka the FCPA Professor, looks at the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act’s facilitating payments exception, arguing the provision, which allows small “grease payments” to foreign officials, is wrongly being ignored by the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission: “If Congress wants to remove the facilitating payment exception from the FCPA, let Congress do that, not the enforcement agencies through its charging decisions.” Similarly, a Washington Post headline decries the fact that US companies don’t know “whom to bribe.”

Al Jazeera reports on Vancouver-based Pacific Rim Mining’s El Dorado mine in El Salvador which is reportedly shut down at present due to ongoing protests.“Recent murders and death threats against activists in the region have put the spotlight on the gold mining project there,” according to the report. Pacific Rim, for its part, insists it has done nothing wrong and is itself the victim of unscrupulous tactics: “Despite our consistently professional behavior throughout our time in El Salvador and investigations clearing us of any involvement, we are again being maliciously and falsely tied to a horrible act for the third time,” according to a statement posted on the company website.

Despite continued rumblings within South Africa’s African National Congress about nationalizing mines, Anglo American Platinum, the world’s biggest platinum producer says the government simply does not have the money to follow through.

Declaring “the future of the global economy lies in the hands of poor countries,” Harvard economist Dani Rodrik looks at the long-term growth prospects of these states to see whether we are headed toward a newly egalitarian economic world order. His conclusion: probably not. “Ultimately, greater convergence in the post-crisis global economy appears inevitable. But a large reversal in the fortunes of rich and poor countries seems neither economically likely, nor politically feasible.”

Colombian ambassador to London Mauricio Rodríguez argues no option should be left off the table in the search for a completely new approach to fighting the global drug trade. One key element, he says, is to follow the money: “Let’s be serious about where the big money is. If you look at the trail of cocaine, you’ll find that 5% of the profits remain in the producing countries; 95% is in the distribution networks and laundered. The big money is in the big banks in the big countries; the big money is in the US, Europe and Asia.”

Fox News’s Oliver North recounts his conversation with a young man who asks him what he intends to do “once ‘The Empire’ bans your shotguns,” in reference to negotiations on the UN-sponsored Arms Trade Treaty that would regulate the international transfer of conventional weapons without interfering with “the right of States to regulate internal transfers of arms and national ownership, including through national constitutional protections on private ownership, exclusively within their territory.” The piece ends with the two men, anxious about their guns but filled with mutual admiration, parting ways: “When he got into his truck, I noticed his license plate: Massachusetts. Home of Paul Revere, John Adams, John Hancock. When an empire struck at Americans in 1775, they knew what to do. Let’s hope we still do.”

Howard Berman, a member of the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, makes the case for his efforts to modernize American foreign assistance. He says the changes he will propose this fall include “reforms in the areas of conflict prevention and mitigation, human rights and democracy, security assistance, and trade and investment programs.”  Berman points out the current legislation is 50 years old and better suited to the Cold War than today’s world. “In this tight budget environment, one thing that can unite Democrats and Republicans is a commitment to make our foreign assistance programs more efficient and more effective.  We may have differing views on how much aid to provide and to which countries, but we should all agree to deliver aid in a way that reaches the intended beneficiaries and achieves its desired objectives.” But the University of Ottawa’s Stephen Brown has argued that, while most can agree on the desirability of making aid more effective, “the definition of what constitutes effectiveness and the choice of means to promote it are highly debatable.”

A Globe and Mail piece entitled “When business charity goes wrong,” uses the example of iwearyourshirt.com as a cautionary tale about the potentially disastrous consequences of acting on good intentions without doing one’s homework first.

Inter Press Service’s Thalif Deen looks at how much progress has been made since last July’s UN resolution making water and sanitation a human right. The answer, according to those he interviews, is not much.

Latest Developments, July 21

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The World Bank has released a report on the challenge posed by the theft of public assets from poor countries, which it describes as “an immense problem with a staggering development impact.” The report’s authors estimate that about $5 billion in assets have been recovered over the last 15 years, which amounts to 1/1,500th of the World Bank’s lowest estimate of the total stolen over that time. But the Tax Justice Network argues the real proportion of repatriated assets may be more like 1/3,800th of illicit financial flows out of the Global South.

Four Kenyans claiming to have been tortured by British soldiers during the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s have taken a major step towards obtaining reparations, as a British judge has ruled the plaintiffs have sufficient grounds to pursue a lawsuit. “This is not about money,” their lawyer said. “It is about restoring people’s dignity.” The UK’s Foreign Office argues it is not responsible for any wrongdoing during the colonial period and Kenya’s government should take care of compensating victims, an argument the judge termed “dishonourable.”

The UN has “strongly welcomed” new data providing further evidence that male circumcision is an effective way of preventing HIV in men. “Scaling up voluntary medical male circumcision services rapidly to young men in high HIV prevalence settings will help reach the 2015 goal of reducing sexual transmission of HIV by 50 per cent,” according to UNAIDS executive director Michel Sidibé. One of the leaders in this trend is Tanzania which “plans to circumcise at least 2.8 million men and boys between the ages of 10 and 34 over a five-year period.” Meanwhile, in San Francisco where HIV/AIDS was the fourth leading cause of death among men aged 25-54 in 2007, the battle is heating up over a proposed measure that would ban the circumcision of boys under the age of 18. The so-called Male Genital Mutilation Bill will be put to the California city’s voters in November.

Global Financial Integrity’s Tom Cardamone has announced the imminent launch of an international petition to fight perceived efforts by the US Chamber of Commerce and Wisconsin congressman Tom Sensenbrenner to weaken the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the 34 year-old piece of legislation aimed at punishing individuals and corporations who pay bribes overseas.

The Economist appears to have coined a new acronym, MIFF, to describe the “the emergence of a group of middle-income but failed or fragile states” that, despite moderate prosperity at the national level, account for 17 percent of the world’s people living on less than $1 a day. That figure has skyrocketed from one percent in 2005. “Anybody concerned with alleviating world poverty must reckon with the MIFFs,” the author argues.

Peru’s ambassador to the UN Gonzalo Gutiérrez makes a similar point in arguing “the cold figure of GDP per capita does not reflect the actual state of development in a particular country.” He is calling on the donor community to change the criteria it uses when devising aid policy and to recognize that most of the world’s poor live in so-called middle-income countries. “It is illogical to leave 70 percent of those who suffer most in the world, simply because a general index says that they are already in the medium-income countries,” he said.

And in a Project Syndicate piece entitle “Debt and Delusion,” Yale University economist Robert Shiller warns of the dangers of obsessing over economic indicators, such as debt-to-GDP ratios. Fear of “some magic threshold” beyond which a country will become insolvent is causing a stampede towards austerity measures which are likely to do more harm than good. “We should worry less about debt ratios and thresholds, and more about our inability to see these indicators for the artificial – and often irrelevant – constructs that they are.”

The Royal United Services Institute’s Knox Chitiyo says the relationship between Europe and Africa has moved beyond “handouts and hoopla” and the “scramble for Africa.” In fact, he believes we are now seeing the beginning of “Africa’s scramble for the world.” Now that Africa can boast some of the world’s fastest growing economies, Chitiyo says Europe needs its southern neighbour in order to dig out of its recession.

Washington-based economist Thomas Palley makes the case for a global minimum wage to counteract “globalization’s undermining of the income generation process.” Palley does not suggest introducing a rich-country level of wage floor to poor countries, but rather “establishing a global set of rules for setting country minimum wages.” Rather than calculating specific wage levels that would then rise with inflation, he proposes agreeing on a fixed percentage of median wages that would vary according to national and regional economic conditions. “Just as globalization demands global trade rules for goods and services and global financial rules for financial markets, so too labor markets need global rules,” Palley argues.

Recapping the events of last week’s Arms Trade Treaty negotiations, Transparency International’s representatives at the meetings say they are “delighted” by the apparent broad support – from investors, industry and governments – for including anti-corruption language in the agreement. And Oxfam’s Scott Stedjan refutes US gun lobby objections to the proposed treaty, saying an ATT would have “no impact on the Second Amendment freedoms.”

Latest Developments, July 14

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South Sudan has become the UN’s 193rd member amid much hope and apprehension about its future prospects.

Canada is complicating preliminary negotiations for a multilateral treaty regulating the sale and transfer of conventional weapons by insisting on a number of exemptions. The Canadian delegation proposed the following addition to the draft accord: “Reaffirming that small arms have certain legitimate civilian uses, including sporting, hunting and collecting purposes.” To which Mexico reportedly replied that “victims don’t make that difference and neither should we.” Canada, whose Conservative government has scored considerable points with its base by promising to scrap the federal long-gun registry established by its Liberal predecessor, also proposed exemptions for ammunition and other “high volume items.”

Britain has suspended budgetary support to Malawi due to concerns over diminishing democracy and economic mismanagement. In making the announcement, the UK’s Department for International Development pointed to a number of indications of poor economic stewardship, including its assessment that “tobacco exports have deteriorated.” Given the fact that the UK trains and equips the counternarcotics police in Afghanistan, the British government apparently believes Malawian tobacco is good but Afghan poppies are bad.

Jayati Ghosh, warning of India’s “jobless growth” and increases in “fragile and unprotected” casual contracts, calls on the government to embrace employment creation for the young and educated in order to avoid “larger gaps between aspiration and reality in India’s labour markets.” To which, Bill Easterly tweets “Scary “jobless growth”! Wait, isn’t output growth > labor growth called “productivity growth” AKA “development”?”

The US is defending the CIA’s use of a fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan to obtain the DNA of some of Osama bin Laden’s relatives. “People need to put this into some perspective,” a U.S. official said. “The vaccination campaign was part of the hunt for the world’s top terrorist, and nothing else.” Meanwhile, the CIA is allegedly using a secret prison and rendition to buttress its counterterrorism efforts in Somalia. And Yemeni journalist Khaled al-Hammadi has tweeted today’s CIA drone strike in the south of the country was a “clear message that #US administration is supporting #Saleh’s regime & his family against pro-democracy” forces.

A new poll suggests the US is losing Arab public opinion, as data from Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates give America a lower approval rating than it had in the last year of the Bush Administration. And President Obama scored worse than the leaders of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, France and Iran. “We are talking about expectations raised and expectations dashed,” according to James Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute, which commissioned the poll.  “Obama didn’t create the problem [of anger at US policies]. He created the expectations that the problem will be solved.”

In a new report on tax havens, Richard Murphy argues “whilst eliminating tax haven abuse is the right thing to do, such a policy must take into consideration the local populations of those places that have been tax havens, many of whom have worked in the financial services sector as it has been the only source of employment available to them.” And so, Murphy proposes “those locations willing to reform their tax haven practices should be given support to protect jobs and livelihoods as they pass through a period of transition in their economies.

Rupert Murdoch may be behind lobbying efforts to weaken the US anti-bribery legislation under which some would now like to see him prosecuted, and a pair of American telecom companies have been accused of involvement in a Haitian bribery scheme.

Saleem Ali makes a mining-free argument for returning to the gold standard. In his view, gold could restore a measure of financial discipline to the global economic system without sacrificing ecological considerations if “a nation’s gold reserves could remain “stored” in their natural underground state, rather than being mined, purified, and deposited in a Fort Knox–like vault.”

A new documentary chronicling a UN resettlement program in Nairobi’s biggest slum illustrates the distance that can separate international development workers from those they propose to help. And Hand Relief International’s Dr. Alden Kurtz has a similar, if decidedly cheekier, message  as Engineers Without Borders: the development industry would benefit from admitting to its failures.