Tag: united nation
Obama Readies Climate Change Push At U.N. Summit

Obama Readies Climate Change Push At U.N. Summit

Washington (AFP) — President Barack Obama will seek to galvanize international support in the fight against climate change on Tuesday when he addresses the United Nations, with time running out on his hopes of leaving a lasting environmental legacy.

Obama has warned that failure to act on climate change would be a “betrayal” of future generations, but faced with a Congress reluctant to even limit greenhouse gas emissions — let alone ratify an international agreement — his options appear limited.

Tuesday’s climate summit in New York kicks off a process that will culminate in Paris at the end of 2015, where the world’s powers will hope to seal a new global climate change pact.

“Internationally, this is the opportunity for the president to leave his mark on the issue,” said Alden Meyer, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington-based think-tank.

Obama’s last meeting with heads of state to try to strike a climate deal, in Copenhagen five years ago, ended in bitter disappointment.

“I think that people are justified in being disappointed about the outcome in Copenhagen,” Obama said at the time, lamenting the failure to agree a timetable to reduce emissions over the coming decades.

– Complicated landscape –

Five years after that setback, the landscape remains complicated.

“I think that there is some greater sense of perhaps realism as well as ambition among parties than perhaps there was in 2009,” said Todd Stern, the United States top climate negotiator.

“I think, at the same time, these negotiations are always difficult,” he said in a recent conference call.

In the short term, it remains highly unlikely that the 120 heads of state and government due to attend Tuesday’s one-day meeting in New York will meet the expectations of U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who has called for “bold pledges” to be made.

The White House has said it will not announce its post-2020 goals in New York this week, but rather plans to roll an out ambitious target early next year according to John Podesta, Obama’s adviser on climate and energy.

“You can expect the U.S. to make public by the first quarter of 2015 a strong national target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the post-2020 time frame,” Podesta said.

“The President will use his speech at the Climate Summit to call on other leaders to keep their ambition high and to work toward a strong global framework to cut emissions.”

For the time being, the Obama administration will highlight the measures it has taken in recent months to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels.

And activists may be gearing up to push harder: celebrities, political leaders and the masses rallied in New York and across the globe on Sunday demanding urgent action on climate change, with organizers saying 600,000 people hit the streets.

– Ambitious 2030 goal –

In June, Obama unveiled new standards aimed at achieving a drastic reduction in carbon emissions from all existing power plants — a 30 percent reduction of 2005 levels by 2030.

But the White House has delayed addressing the difficult debate surrounding the legal nature of the agreement that 195 nations in the U.N. Convention on Climate Change will hope to reach in Paris at the end of next year.

The U.S. Constitution states that all legally binding treaties must be ratified by two thirds of the U.S. Senate, an unthinkable prospect in the current political climate. Memories of the Kyoto Protocol, negotiated and signed in 1997 but never ratified by the United States, also loom large.

U.S. negotiator Stern said the terms of any new climate agreement “is a matter that is completely open for question and for discussion,” noting that in Durban in 2011 the countries had agreed only to negotiate a “protocol, another legal instrument or agreed outcome with legal force.”

“That is a very elastic phrase,” Stern said.

Obama’s climate team is reportedly working to put together a “politically binding” deal which would combine voluntary pledges with legally binding conditions from already existing treaties. Any such pact would avoid the need to seek ratification from the U.S. Senate.

“Unfortunately, this would be just another of many examples of the Obama administration’s tendency to abide by laws that it likes and to disregard laws it doesn’t like — and to ignore the elected representatives of the people when they don’t agree,” U.S. Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in response to reports outlining the administration’s strategy.

Jennifer Morgan of the World Resources Institute said any international agreement faced a “very challenging road” in the United States.

“It’s also a narrow road, because for most other countries around the world, having an agreement that is legally binding is a top priority,” she said.

“They want to know that the U.S. and other countries are going to implement their commitments. It will be one of the big challenges for president Obama to navigate that with other countries.”

AFP Photo/Timothy A. Clary

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U.N. Condemns Ethnic Killings In South Sudan Oil Town

U.N. Condemns Ethnic Killings In South Sudan Oil Town

By Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times

JOHANNESBURG — The United Nations on Monday condemned ethnic killings by South Sudan rebels that left hundreds of people dead last week after the fall of an oil town to the opposition forces.

The world body said the killings took place in Bentiu, the hub of the country’s main oil producing region in the north.

U.N. spokesman Joe Contreras said in a statement that some members of the rebel Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement in Opposition broadcast hate messages on radio after taking control of Bentiu, urging certain ethnic groups to leave town.

Some commanders from the Nuer people called on their men to rape non-Nuer women in revenge attacks. Other commanders urged unity and an end to tribalism, but their messages failed to halt the violence.

The governing Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement and the army split in December between supporters of President Salva Kiir, a member of the Dinka people, and his rival, Vice President Riek Machar, a Nuer. The power struggle triggered fighting and ethnic killings in many parts of the country, especially in towns such as Bor and Malakal that have changed hands multiple times.

Peace talks in neighboring Ethiopia produced a truce in January that has not stopped the fighting.

Contreras said U.N. human rights investigators had established that after the SPLM in Opposition took Bentiu in Unity state last week, its predominantly Nuer fighters searched a mosque, hospital and other areas where people had taken refuge and killed people on the basis of ethnicity and nationality. A day later, armed Dinka youths invaded a U.N. peacekeeping base in the Jonglei state town of Bor and opened fire, killing dozens of Nuer.

“At Bentiu Hospital, on 15 April, several Nuer men, women and children were killed for hiding and declining to join other Nuers who had gone out to cheer the (Sudan People’s Liberation Army) in Opposition forces as they entered the town,” Contreras said. “Individuals from other South Sudanese communities, as well as Darfuris, were specifically targeted and killed at the hospital.”

The Nuer rebels also entered the Kalli-Ballee mosque where hundreds of civilians were sheltering, allowing some people to go, based on ethnicity, but detaining and killing others.

More than 200 people were killed and 400 were injured at the mosque, according to the U.N. Gunmen went to a Roman Catholic church and World Food Program compound where people had taken refuge, demanding to know people’s ethnicity and killing members of certain groups.

U.N. peacekeeping forces rescued about 500 people from the hospital, mosque, airport and other locations and escorted them to their base.

About 22,000 people have sought shelter at a U.N. compound in Bentiu. Toby Lanzer, the world body’s humanitarian coordinator in South Sudan, said on his Twitter account that thousands of people thronged the gates of compound after violence broke out last week.

On Thursday, the base in Bentiu was attacked with rockets. Civilians at the base are terrified there may be a repeat of the attack in Bor, where outsiders got into the U.N. base there and opened fire.

“We are not feeling safe now after what had happened in Bor,” said Moubark Mousa, a displaced person in Bentiu, according to a U.N. statement.

Raisedon Zenenga, the officer in charge of the U.N. Mission in South Sudan, or UNMISS, called on both sides in the conflict to stop targeting civilians.

“These atrocities must be fully investigated and the perpetrators and their commanders shall be held accountable,” he said.

About 7 million South Sudanese face severe hunger as a result of the conflict, while 770,000 have fled their homes, including 70,000 sheltering in U.N. bases. The world body launched an appeal for $1.27 billion to prevent starvation, but only 36 percent of the target has been raised from donors.

Contreras said the U.N. was investigating human rights violations by both sides, across South Sudan. The violence has been concentrated in the east and north of the country.

AFP Photo/Simon Maina