Fast on the heels of the report commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council on Darfur, the United Nations Foundation today published "UNF Insights: Darfur and Beyond," an essay written by Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Lee Feinstein on a revolutionary principle adopted by the United Nations -- the "responsibility to protect" -- and the steps that could be taken to translate that principle into action -- both in Darfur and in preventing future mass atrocities.
Darfur and the Responsibility to Protect
One year ago the United Nations formally endorsed a principle known as the "responsibility to protect," the idea that mass atrocities that take place in one state are the concern of all states. The universal adoption of this principle at the United Nations World Summit in 2005 went relatively unnoticed. Yet it was a turning point in how states define their rights and responsibilities....The question now is whether this pledge was humanitarian hypocrisy, or did they have something serious in mind? Read more...
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has appealed for $1.7 million to feed 30,000 of the poorest Iraqi refugees who have fled to Syria.
"Those leaving Iraq are doing so in greater haste and either have had no time to sell their belongings, or cannot find buyers," WFP Country Representative in Syria Pippa Bradford said. "As a result, people arrive in Syria with far less cash, only to find there are fewer opportunities to cope than for those who came before them."There are 1.8 million Iraqi refugees estimated to be scattered around the Middle East. More
This is a bit beyond our normal UN coverage, but one agency that rarely gets the recognition it deserves is the World Intellectual Property Organization (or WIPO), which is dedicated to developing common international intellectual property rights mechanisms. This includes arbitrating so-called "cyber squatting" complaints. For those not in the know, cyber-squatting is "registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad-faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else." For example, (and this was a real case brought to arbitration) if one were to register the domain name Madonna.com in Tunisia, then market it as an "adult entertainment site," one would be accused of cyber-squating. Cyber squatting is illegal in the United States and many other countries.
This is all coming to my attention today because WIPO just announced that there has been a 25% increase in cyber squatting complaints in 2006. Who knew? Could this be the start of a trend?
The new Human Rights Council has just issued its first report on Darfur. The results are devastating: "The Mission...concludes that the Government of the Sudan has manifestly failed to protect the population of Darfur from large-scale international crimes, and has itself orchestrated and participated in these crimes. As such, the solemn obligation of the international community to exercise its responsibility to protect has become evident and urgent."
Jody Williams, who won a Nobel Prize for her campaign against land mines, headed the Human Rights Council mission to Sudan. But like many other international investigators, NGO workers and journalists, her team could not secure visas to conduct their work in Sudan. According to the report, the mission asked for visas twelve times in a twenty day period. Even Secretary General Ban Ki-moon personally appealed to Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, but to no avail.
Issuing a challenge to the United States, China and India to match European ambitions in the battle against global warming, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany called on the world to follow the European Union's commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels by the year 2020. She said the bloc's 27 members would commit to a 30 percent reduction if other nations followed suit. The plan goes beyond the 35-nation Kyoto Protocol, which requires industrial nations to reduce the emission of global-warming gases by an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. Major European Union economies had already committed to do better than that, promising to decrease greenhouse gases by 8 percent in that time.More